


Those Who Plummet

by Riemann_integrable



Category: B: The Beginning (Anime)
Genre: A Market Maker origin story, Animal Abuse, Background Koku/Yuna, Blood, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking, Gen, Gore, Izanami's POV, Multi, Subtle Izanami/Yuna, Subtle Laica/Minatsuki, Swearing, Trauma, Underage Drinking, mentions of gore, most relationships are kinda lowkey, or just equally relevant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-06-06 00:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15182360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riemann_integrable/pseuds/Riemann_integrable
Summary: How the Market Maker elite's group of eight came about, told right from the start. Detrimental attempts at human bonds where they shouldn't exist; because some people already carry an indelible code.[Izanami's POV]





	1. 1.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot to preface but basically I just have multiple instances in mind about how the MM group grew up and slowly gathered together; I thought a lot about (real) Minatsuki and Izanami's friendship and from how many points of view it had to be just a tragic, tragic thing to both of them. I didn't tag ships because it wasn't supposed to be a ship-centric fic, although I fully intend them to be present, but only in the way that they're relevant... I'm not sure how to explain this... The stuff that makes sense to me according to my (tentatively realistic) headcanons here is Koku/Izanami (one-sided), Koku/Yuna (which isn't present other than Izanami's thirdweel angst), Laica/Minatsuki, maybe a few other tangential ones. I only wrote the loner kids meeting up so far and yet I'm rambling. I'll try being a bit consistent in continuing.

When he told me not to look into his eyes, we were still kids.

 

It could slip, he said. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but admittedly, I did suspect there was something odd about that colour and how it was the exact reverse of Koku’s — a pair of eyes I knew so well and that I longed to cast a glance at me. Minatsuki’s eyes were similar in appearance but much, much different if someone looked closer, though I didn’t do that more than once. Because  _ it could have slipped _ ; what  _ it _ was, I only came to know much later.

 

I met Minatsuki partly by coincidence, partly out of my own volition. Over the course of years spent at Jaula Blanca I had seen him tangentially as they brought him across corridors, where he followed a group of researchers in sterile, white clothing obediently. There was always a group of adults surrounding him as he walked, and most of what I had seen of him, for a long time, were only his dainty feet tapping on the floorboards, peeking out among the numerous larger ones. I knew a lot as young, maybe too much. Being aware of his existence was already uncommon and my image of him became coherent upon trying to observe him on purpose. They were brief moments and I never figured out whether he could sense me watching him, whether he remembered my face; I assumed he didn’t because his expression looked too hollow, too withdrawn, but he rarely made a different one in any occasion afterwards.

 

It could have been weeks later when I could finally pinpoint where his room was. I would stare up at the window from the courtyard sometimes and see his face half-obfuscated by the damp windowglass and the snowfall, one bright azure and one grey eye. If I had to explain what drew me to Minatsuki, I’m not sure I could. It was a combination of Koku’s loss of interest in me and something that — at the time — looked like a vague parallel between our conditions. He’s lonely, I thought that day while my shoes dug small pits into the snow as I strolled without any incentive to interact with my peers. The latter were doing what they always had, playing, running around and piling white mass atop the next unfortunate person who ended up on the ground. It was something that maybe I would have wanted to participate in, if only Koku’s presence didn’t make my heart beat in an uneasy way. It was painful, that’s what made my ten-year-old self think there might have been more connection between me and the pale creature watching from inside his room, still as a statue, with unwavering interest. It was of a selfishness common to that age that I sought out Minatsuki’s company with determination a day later.

 

“Who’s the one with Koku’s eyes?” I asked while dangling my legs from the hospital bed.

 

I had just finished my medical examination with Canopus who was sat at his desk, prescribing all the necessary medicine to me. I knew my only chance was asking him; nobody else among the adults bothered spending their time with us. He furrowed his brows while turning towards me, it was a face he didn’t make often, so it made me wonder if I had said something wrong.

 

“What do you mean?” He probably knew and just had to make sure.

 

“The boy who looks out the window.” I waited for a reply that didn’t come, so I added; “Why is he in there?”

 

He flashed a small smile that had something secretive and, retrospectively, sad about it.

 

“You ask too many questions, Izanami.”

 

With that, he got back to writing the report. I’ve never been the kind to pry, so I stared at my feet flinging back and forth above the floor of Canopus’s office equipped with run-down instruments and pleasantly illuminated by sunlight. Maybe this type of curiosity was to my detriment, I knew I should have trusted him on that. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder — about the person I had never seen together with either my group or the reggies, and with whom my childish mind spontaneously decided to form an imaginary bond. It was the furthest I could get from Koku, if that was what he wanted, if he hated me so much. That type of inner dramatism ran astray in my mind back then. 

 

“All done,” I heard Canopus mumble, jolting up. 

 

I hopped off the bed, already resigned to the brief conversation being over, when he crouched down to my eye level and added;

 

“His name is Minatsuki. It’s better if you don’t get involved with him.”

 

“Can I visit?” The question was blurted out impulsively.

 

Canopus’s face softened like it usually did when he gave in to our demands, which he did way too easily.

 

“I’ll try asking” he sighed.

 

To this day, I’m still amazed at the amount of influence Heath Flick must have had in order to arrange the meeting between the two of us. The regulations around Minatsuki were very strict; he was only allowed to leave for checkups and operations, though they didn’t have to mess with his body very often, his main advantage being his miraculously developed resistance to the side-effects of being a reggie. Most of the meddling only involved taking samples of DNA or various tissues that they would then try to artificially farm. He came back with whole patches of his skin missing under the bandages or even a cut-off pinky finger once, something I had seen from glimpses when I passed him by earlier. I quickly figured his regenerative abilities were the same as every other kid’s as the injuries always healed within the next day. It made me wonder, on the other hand, what he would think of me if he knew I had taken note of so many details about him; when Canopus and two other researchers took me to his room, I was a bit nervous.

 

The door had a three-layer security lock and was entirely made of steel. It looked like one of those gigantic safes they supposedly have in banks, as if they were storing vast amounts of money behind it — or something of equal value. One of the men dressed in white fiddled with passcodes and combinations until, after numerous clicks and greasy noises of gears turning, the passage opened before us.

 

“Do you have a deathwish for this kid?” He asked, turning towards Canopus while they stepped inside and I followed them cautiously.

 

“That isn’t to be discussed,” he replied sternly, in a tone he only used with the other adults in the facility, “I take responsibility for this. Don’t put it into question.”

 

I wasn’t paying attention to their back-and-forth; instead, I was fixated on the inside of the room. My legs felt a bit wobbly underneath me, an undeniable nervousness creeping its way into my brain from both what was said and the lingering tension. The easiest thing to notice was how strangely empty the place was, barely the necessary furniture to live. It looked like the more polite version of a prison cell, with a bathroom occupying a corner and a bed on the other side of it, not even a chair, a table or a nightstand. The window was unwashed, filtering the outside light opaquely. There was something heavy and miserable about the whole setting.

 

“I’ll leave you alone for a few hours, if something happens just shout and somebody will be here to get you.” Canopus patted me on the shoulder as he spoke with a seriousness I didn’t like. 

 

With that, the door closed behind them and I was left inside, knowing I wasn’t alone but struck by the same sensation as if I was. 

 

It took me a surprising amount of time to notice him despite how small the room was. It was something Minatsuki was good at, making his presence imperceptible: he could have been two metres from you and you wouldn’t have paid attention to him, he blended in with his background like a chameleon. Maybe it was his ability to be so strangely still, the same as he was right now: lying on the floor in a corner that fell out of the field of vision when one entered, a few sheets of paper tossed around him, one of which he was busy trailing something on. 

 

My breath hitched when he turned his face around slightly, just enough to look at me, I had never been so intimidated by someone who hadn’t even talked to me yet. He looked skinny, pale and unhealthy, long bangs falling into his oddly-coloured eyes. His hand with the crayon in it slowed down until it halted completely across the paper.

 

“Why were you brought here?” He asked, and his voice was but an exhale.

 

A part of me wanted to be offended at how he didn’t even ask who I was and just cut to the chase, as if I shouldn’t have expected him to not be interested. I stepped closer, mustering what was left of my confidence.

 

“I asked to” I replied. 

 

“Why?”

 

“I was curious.”

 

Minatsuki stood up and began examining me without a single facial muscle moving aside from his eyes, darting across my features. He looked a bit older than me, surpassing me in a few centimeters of height, but then again, everyone from my group — the successful ones — was a bit weak-looking compared to reggies. It made me wonder if he was one.

 

“Are you Minatsuki?” 

 

His only response was giving a hardly visible nod, but suddenly it dawned on me that — despite his apparent neutrality — he looked incredibly confused by the situation. From then onwards, it was something I had to learn, one of the hardest tasks: reading him when his face betrayed nothing, picking up on minute cues. I figured I had to progress the interaction myself, so I took a few more steps until I was standing close enough before him, and reached out his way with a hand.

 

“Nice to meet you, I’m Izanami.”

Minatsuki’s reciprocation was slow and full of suspicion; he stared at my open palm for a few seconds like there was some trick to it, then he grabbed it unsurely. I was about to say something more friendly, more mundane, but he spoke before me, as soon as we both let go of the handshake.

 

“Who told you about me?”

 

“I saw you,” I said with more sincerity than I had planned, “when you were brought places. And through the window.”

 

Children have a better sense for dropping a conversation when it has to be, and in that moment, we did. I directed my attention at the papers on the floor.

 

“What were you up to?”

 

“Drawing,” he gazed at the window, absent, “there isn’t much else to do here.”

 

I took a moment to go through all the artistic pieces lying around, and at that point I could tell that the more I got to know about Minatsuki, the more confused I was about him. I couldn’t find a better phrase for the messy shapes he had concocted — with apparently a single black crayon every time — other than that they looked like they were made by someone who had never seen another person draw. I kneeled down to pick some up and look at them more closely, and Minatsuki followed suit, blankly observing what I was doing. They were drawings devoid of aesthetic rules, not bad-looking but chillingly  _ free _ ; sometimes he scribbled something in the corner of the sheet and left it at that, other times it was a gigantic garble occupying the whole space. 

 

“They’re interesting” I commented, instantly hoping he wouldn’t take it the wrong way.

 

“I have one of you.”

 

I raised my eyebrows, not sure what he meant, seeing which he crawled to the bed to reach underneath it and retrieve another enormous pile of his creations. He skimmed through them expertly, like he had done it way too many times, pulling out the right one when he found it. He handed me the picture and I couldn’t help my lips from curling up a little.

 

“What am I doing?”

 

“You’re riding a plane.” He shrugged, face still passive, but I could spot a bit of underlying embarrassment. “It seemed like something you would do.”

 

“I’ve never been on one, but now I wish…” I said absentmindedly.

 

I couldn’t deny that there was something flattering about this, the fact that Minatsuki — or anyone — had paid so much attention to me in particular. Of course, any ten-year-old would have felt narcissistic, but my desperation towards how Koku had started ignoring me only strengthened my need to latch onto anyone’s approval. I didn’t feel guilty yet — about how utilitarian our relationship was on both ends, as it turned out, but I wasn’t old enough to think about it. It felt good for us to be friends, even if in a self-centered way, and that’s what friendship was meant to be, right?

 

“Why did you draw me?” I asked, suddenly.

 

“I drew all of you,” Minatsuki explained, grabbing a few more sheets depicting scenes that featured Kirisame and the others, “I tried imagining what you did when you weren’t  _ there _ ” he nodded towards the single window to indicate the courtyard outside.

 

In a few minutes I was already focused on browsing the mass of drawings and asking him what they were meant to be. It was an activity that entertained me predictably considering it was a hobby I like to engage in as well, though my self-expression looked much different than Minatsuki’s. Sometimes it was hard to hold back laughter at the surrealism of what he apparently thought the outside world was like, I was just tactful enough; animals in climates where they weren’t supposed to live, misplaced objects, buildings that looked too absurd to be physically accomplishable, all rigorously drawn in only black.

 

“Don’t you use other colours?”

 

“They don’t let Canopus bring me more, sometimes he can’t get paper either” I heard Minatsuki say. “But it’s alright,” he added, “because if you mixed them all together you’d get black anyway. So this is like having every colour.”

 

“I don’t know,” I scratched my chin, “it doesn’t look the same.”

 

As I was looking at one scribble after another, I got stuck on a particular one that prompted me to freeze and look at it for longer than I have all the others. I almost had to squint to interpret it, to figure out what it even represented.

 

“What’s this one about?” My voice had gone a little quiet at the stylized shapes that I didn’t want to see as contorted bodies but that’s all my mind would click to.

 

“Oh, that—” Minatsuki was trailing off and looking for words. “That’s just something that happened to me.”

 

I felt a sudden urge to stand up. A suspicion was growing inside me, which looked perhaps a bit paranoid to me on the spot, but after the cryptic conversation between Canopus and the researcher I couldn’t help but wonder. There was something terrible lurking in that room, I could feel it in the air. For a little while I didn’t know what to say, or rather,  _ how _ to say what I wanted to say.

 

“Did somebody do something bad to you? Is that—” I left the sentence in half while looking back at the picture I had left on the floor. 

 

Minatsuki hopped on his feet too, moving in to approach me, to which I instinctively took a step back. He looked almost surprised that I got startled. I didn’t know why I did, either.

 

“They came to get me then, that day,” his voice was monotonous to an extent I wish I didn’t have to listen to, “but I was in a bad mood.”

 

He paused. I can pinpoint, now, that moment as the one I should have screamed in. Or maybe it should have been slightly later, when he had already uttered the next phrase.

 

“So I killed them all.”

 

And, because the forces that pulled me towards him were stronger than my common sense, the only thing that came from my mouth was a huff of breath Minatsuki couldn’t even hear. I was trying to think of what had been told me, about the implications of it, and connecting it to the puzzlement in his lifted brows, his soft-looking cheeks and the upturn of his nose was too absurd for a kid my age. It must have been for him, too, but he was used to it.

 

“I didn’t really know they would die,” Minatsuki continued despite my lack of input, “but their head doesn’t work anymore. That’s what Canopus told me.” He gesticulated by poking his temple. 

 

I looked into the matters much later on; he was referring to an incident where, allegedly, six Jaula Blanca employees suffered psychological trauma that sent them into a permanent coma, due to unknown reasons. Not even the classified documents mentioned the fact that they were on Minatsuki’s research staff, or that the latter even existed. He was a shadow with an unrecorded existence, even if his actions weren’t.

 

“Are you scared?” He asked after the silence. 

 

I noticed I had almost pinned my own self against the wall by backing away too much. The correct answer to that question would have been ‘yes’; I was shaking, never having experienced so much danger coming from one person before, and if that wasn’t  _ fear _ , I didn’t know what was. The  _ correct _ answer, however, isn’t always the  _ right _ answer. And so I realized I had to face the unknown and the gruesome, to draw comfort from it that I couldn’t get from the person I loved and suffered for. What I felt for Koku had made me lonely, it made me look for someone both as unhappy and as selfish. I took everything I had, told myself to be brave, and glared straight at Minatsuki’s face, into his mismatched eyes.

 

“I’m not,” I replied, leaving a few seconds blank and then repeating more quietly, “I’m not.”

 

“Your name,” he said, “ _ Izanami _ , right?”

 

I tilted my chin up as confirmation. He remained in the same spot, unnervingly still once again, except for his mouth.

 

“Izanami, you shouldn’t look into my eyes.” To demonstrate, he turned away a bit. “It could slip.”

 

I never asked him, not even in months that followed, what he meant — but the words remained with me and I continued pondering on them until I was forced to understand by the circumstances. When I peeked up at Minatsuki’s face again, my body shuddered only a little, much less than before, but only because I had grown accustomed. His lips were curled up faintly in a smile that was instinctual rather than learned from being often seen on someone else.

 

“Do you want to be friends?” 

 

Some unknown force that added itself to gravity pulled my head down in a nod. 


	2. 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt an odd need to describe all the traumatic bullshit from the attack's night, just to add more details to the canon... My more speculative hc-fest will begin in the next chapter, please bear with my overly intricate obsession with this show.

None of us could foresee what would happen. The successful ones, the reggies, Canopus, nobody. The attack struck us in the middle of the few most peaceful weeks of our lives, at least mine — and surely Minatsuki’s. My promise to befriend him wasn’t an empty one and I tried visiting him as frequently as possible; the staff members recognized me by then, making a few snide remarks between each other about how there must have been something wrong with me, both for wanting to go there and surviving doing so. The door’s intricate locking system opened before me nonetheless, almost every day, and Minatsuki’s face lit up in a way that was hard to detect for anyone else. He enjoyed hanging out. It wasn’t as if he’d ever voiced it, but he seemed progressively less awkward and more soothed around me. We spent our time chatting and engaging in any pointless activity his environment allowed; for some time I felt like this could have been a sustainable life for both of us. I could almost stop thinking about Koku.

 

Then, one late night, we heard the sound of bombs. Suddenly, everything was in flames and Jaula Blanca devolved into chaos in the course of mere minutes. It was too quick for me to even reflect; I had ran off from my supervisors, immediately panicking over how they wouldn’t have been useful in this situation, darted across the burning hallways from which both residents and attackers already seemed to have left. It felt so incredibly hot I thought my skin itself was going to boil, smoke filling my lungs as if death itself was subtly surrounding me.

 

I turned around the corner on the same floor where I had lived up until now, my legs almost giving in as I halted from what I saw next. At least three adults’ dead bodies lied still on the floor, covered in blood, and I could see the last movements of a soldier disappearing in a cloud of smoke in the other direction. I quickly realized I had to go back the other way, all the while coming to my senses about how I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going. Of course, I could then state to myself, still running, I’m looking for Koku. It’s what I was already doing subconsciously. His safety came first compared to everything, like an instruction permanently etched into my mind. 

 

A conflict arose within me a moment later, which made me stop again despite the circumstances. Minatsuki was on the highest floor. His room had three layers of locks on it. Mostly, unlike Koku, he didn’t have anyone else that would help him escape. 

 

I was getting exhausted and dizzy from not breathing properly, but nevertheless I ran up the staircase. Sweating from both the heat and exertion, I realized that I was panicking because — no matter how odd he, himself or our relationship was — I didn’t want Minatsuki to die. It would have felt devastating to lose him after the time we spent together. In a few minutes I finally arrived, only to almost turn around again when I saw a group of attackers standing around the entrance. Looking closer, I ended up remaining in the same place with the tiniest speck of relief and a lot of confusion.

 

I was a bit distant from them, but I could still see Minatsuki there; he stood out by being the only kid in the aggregation of people. They were half-immersed in smoke, so the details evaded me, but I already managed to catch a glimpse of the man I would later come to know as Regulus — or Gilbert Ross. He was leaning down a little, just to look at Minatsuki properly, one of his hands patting his bony shoulder as he nodded. They all started walking in my direction and I couldn’t decide whether I should have ran away.

 

“Izanami” I heard my name being called in that muted tone I had already grown used to, blocked out by the cracking of the fire, and then I gained more confidence and stepped closer.

 

They only stared at me silently for a while. A part of me could sense that the situation was very, very wrong. The man who was, by then, examining me carefully had a distinctly sinister feeling emanating from him that activated my fight-or-flight response even though he hadn’t spoken yet; but I wasn’t concentrating on that. Instead I looked at Minatsuki — careful to avoid his eyes like he had told me but fixated on his face — and realized something had changed about him. It wasn’t just how his cheeks and nose looked puffy like those of someone who had just cried, his posture was uneasy and tense as well and it made me wonder what had happened; no matter what it was, I had a feeling I would have rather not heard.

 

“Do you want to tag along and help me out with something?” Minatsuki walked a few steps closer, making the hot air catch in my throat. He sounded dangerously hoarse. “Since we’re friends and all that.”

 

I knew he wasn’t making an emotional appeal intentionally, but it still touched something in me that made me numb and open to his requests, so I nodded, though I was still scared out of my mind.

 

“Who are they?” I asked as he was about to turn around and return to the group of soldiers.

 

“They’re here to save us,” he responded nonchalantly, “you can come, too. So you won’t get killed.”

 

I didn’t — couldn’t — comment on how they were the same people who had attacked us in the first place. I knew the issue ran deeper. So I followed Minatsuki wordlessly, a few meters behind the rest of them, watched as he conversed with the man from before about something I couldn’t hear. He turned to me again as soon as we got to the end of the hallway, where the soldiers split into two groups and continued onwards, only the three of us remaining.

 

“I will entrust you with two important tasks” said Regulus, whose name I didn’t know yet, calling my attention to the portable camera in his hand. “The first one is to find Yuna, it seems she got lost and we don’t want her to die in the fire, do we? Come back here with her and I’ll tell you the rest.” 

 

Minatsuki was already off while I was hypnotized for a second by the man’s chilling smile. I jolted up and made a quick dash to catch up with him, seeing from the corner of my eye how the other leaned back against the wall while fiddling with the camera and lighting a cigarette. As soon as we got further away, while we peeked into every class and dorm room we came across systematically, I spoke up timidly, spurring Minatsuki to stop.

 

“The others…? Is Koku—” I was already jumbling my words, but when I saw his pupils narrow at the name, my voice died out. It took him a few seconds of contemplation to reply.

 

“They should already be out. Your group, at least.”

 

I wish I had had it in me to spare some concern for the reggies, who — by his words, evidently — were still in danger, but I could only do so much. And  _ so much _ was never enough, thinking back now, but I would be dwelling in my own impotence. 

 

We did, eventually, find Yuna. I didn’t know what to think of her before; I had always wanted to be angry at her for stealing Koku from me, I wanted to despise her and wish she would just go away so she wouldn’t get in the way of  _ my _ romance that I felt I was entitled to. But I couldn’t. Maybe she had suffered enough for me to have sympathy for her, both before these events — being bullied and mistreated — and especially afterwards. I realized there was no anger in me, just sadness, compassion towards her and a dose of pity towards myself. I concluded that yes, it was a good thing that we would get her out of there, no matter how suspicious and confusing the situation I got caught up in was. No matter how utterly scared I felt both by the mysterious man and that new sensation Minatsuki carried with himself I couldn’t define. 

 

She was inside a classroom, curled up against the wall besides the blackboard, on which I saw a scribble of an odd symbol I could swear I had come across before. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to walk past the doorframe, so I stood there and watched as Minatsuki approached her slowly. Yuna perked up when he was right before her and I listened on as their dialogue progressed. Minatsuki was talking about all sorts of things I didn’t understand; about being Koku’s brother, about escaping, reassuring her. I knew it was a bold-faced lie — I knew it wasn’t beyond him to tell one and that it wasn’t beyond Yuna to buy it. But I didn’t interfere, maybe because at that point I had realized how powerless I was, and a few minutes later the three of us were already strolling down the corridors way too calmly considering the fire around us.

 

Minatsuki was holding Yuna’s hand all the while; more than a sweet or protective gesture it seemed like a way to make sure she wouldn’t get away, like he was dragging a pet along with himself. We were soon back to where we came from, Minatsuki giving the girl a push so she would walk the mysterious man’s way with a little stumble. He was almost done smoking the cigarette from before, or maybe he had started a new one. 

 

“What do we have here?” His eyes were an eerie blue, glimmering upon seeing Yuna, either from her being there, or — which I now find more plausible — from the satisfaction of knowing Minatsuki managed bring her. He kneeled down. “Nice to meet you, my name is Regulus.”

 

“Now, onto the next thing” he stood up again. I staggered back in horror when he pulled out a knife and moved in Minatsuki’s direction, but in the end all he did was hand it to him. “I’m sure you’ll pull it off.”

 

“Who?” His voice was even more quiet than usual, I could barely hear it as I watched him examine the weapon in his tiny palm with perplexion but no fear. 

 

“You know who,” Regulus smiled wider, “and he deserves it, don’t you think? It will feel satisfying.”

 

“It will” Minatsuki approved without a single millisecond of hesitation.

 

In the back of my mind, I knew what that meant. And yet it couldn’t prevent any of the shock, the cold sweat I broke out in when I saw him emotionlessly stab into Heath Kazama Flick’s back, making it almost seem like an unsurprising thing to do from the grace and naturality of the movement. I felt as if a wave of freezing air had just hit me, even though the temperature was scalding due to the flames consuming Jaula Blanca around us. Canopus was rambling before himself, he must have been in too much shock and pain to talk any more clearly. On the other end of the corridor stood the attackers, all carrying large machine guns, while Minatsuki straightened his back next to me as Dr. Kazama, the only researcher I felt had ever cared for us, collapsed before him from the bleeding wound he had inflicted on his abdomen. 

 

Everything I was assisting to, everything I felt was becoming too much. I didn’t know how many tragedies or horrifying absurdities I could take. It felt like a terrible nightmare, like some otherworldly scenario from Minatsuki’s drawings that was simply too devastating to be real. I noticed Regulus stepping out of the shadows as the device he had brought with himself was steadily recording the events, but it barely mattered to me. I felt myself crumbling onto my knees involuntarily and reaching out at the knife still sticking out by Canopus’s spinal column, which nobody had bothered to pull out. 

 

I could feel Minatsuki’s eyes on me. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would break out of my chest; I think that was the moment I started fully comprehending the extent to which he was able to  _ destroy _ , even if I hadn’t seen his power yet. I didn’t know what I would have asked him, if I even had the strength to speak as I sat there on the ground, fingers trembling and barely daring to touch the handle of the weapon. I was pleading him, but I didn’t — and don’t — know what for. I could have been childish enough to cry out at him to make it go back, to make the blood gushing from Canopus’s chest disappear and the injury revert. Minatsuki seemed to have enough regard left in him not to harm me, but he remained unfazed by my pain too. He then shifted his head just slightly, and for some reason I knew what he wanted me to do; I pulled out the knife, trying my best not to look or hear the sounds it made. I didn’t want to, but I was too scared to oppose myself to it.

 

Minatsuki looked outright possessed when he took the object from me to return to Regulus’s side.

 

“You are the devil,” he pointed the tip of the blade in Canopus’s direction in a tone that made it sound like it was somebody else speaking through his mouth, “I’m not anyone’s spare parts. Goodbye, Canopus.”

 

Dr. Kazama was reaching out from where he was lying, trying to say something more, but he couldn’t manage. They almost left without me, I only managed to rush to them in the last minute. The naïve part of me wanted to demand explanations from Minatsuki since he hadn’t told me a single thing ever since hell broke loose in the institution and the man called Regulus showed up. At the same time, no matter how calm and peaceful he looked as he followed in the adults’ footsteps on the crumbling corridors in that particular moment, I was dead afraid of him. I didn’t hate him, no, I never could have — perhaps that was a flaw of mine — but I was  _ afraid _ . I couldn’t put together the puzzle pieces, why he was doing what he was doing, why obeyed every order coming from these people, nor what looked so unnervingly different about him. 

 

“Ah, this is bad,” Regulus scratched the back of his head, suddenly stopping. 

 

In the dead end of the hallway we had been passing through were a group of Jaula Blanca residents, curled up all together and trembling in fear as soon as we got close enough to them. I didn’t remember any of their faces and it soon made me figure out they were reggies and their caretakers, being that they usually kept them separate from our group. There were barely two or three supervisors with them, trying to cover and protect as many kids as possible, but the latter outnumbered them. 

 

“What should we do with them,” he exhaled, “Minatsuki?”

 

I couldn’t see Minatsuki’s expression from behind, but there was a vague tremble of rage in his voice that made me even more curious about what had escalated in my absence considering his usual detachment.

 

“The reggies, we don’t need them—” he had to cut himself off but continued shortly, in that same, blood-curdlingly calm tone he used sometimes, “Kill all of them.”

 

Before the men with guns could move, he approached the small crowd with slow steps on what appeared to be a whim; meanwhile some of them had started running off at the sides with despairing whimpers and screams, only to be immediately executed by the soldiers who stood in the way. The situation was unraveling independently from whatever Minatsuki tried to do in the meantime. I was probably the only one still paying attention to him as he closed in on a corner like a leisurely predator, five kids stuck there, rigid like animals who know they have no chance to escape. He inspected them carefully; I followed along with my eyes. There were three little girls and two boys slightly older than them, and Minatsuki reached out to grab one of the latter by the arm and yank him away from the others. His choice had stood out to me, from what I remember, as the one among them who was panicking the most, face pale and drenched, teeth rattling. 

 

“I know…” Minatsuki muttered to himself when he forcefully pushed him against a wall a few steps away, “I’ll use this reggie. His eyes are the same colour as mine.”

 

I saw him lean close to the other boy whose limbs were shaking in an almost convulsive way by then — almost too close for me to catch a glimpse of his earlier-mentioned eyes, a vibrant blue glowing almost unnaturally against the light of the embers behind, admittedly not unlike the King’s eye. I noticed that Minatsuki’s hand was on his face, thumb brushing across his cheek roughly.

 

“Don’t be afraid,” I could barely hear him whisper; this moment was somehow making my guts toss and turn more than before, “you’ll be my phantom, just like I was his.”

 

Later on it was easier not to look into his eyes, when he started covering them up, but as I stumbled backwards, I figured I  _ definitely _ knew now why I shouldn’t. I knew too much — even if I hadn’t been filled in on most of the events. I was sick of it. I wanted to be anywhere except the end of that specific corridor, where almost half the reggies had already been shot dead on the ground and the heat was growing intolerable. I felt like it was the first time Regulus had paid particular attention to me, because he looked down as I trembled, raising a brow with a smile never leaving his face. He threw the cigarette butt into the fire. 

 

“What’s the matter?”

 

“I need to,—” I was stuttering under his heavy eyes, coming up with any excuse I could, “I need to check up on something—”

 

“That’s alright,” Regulus said, “just be there in the courtyard in the next ten minutes. If you want to live, that is.”

 

I didn’t even care how oddly permissive he was being and how wrong it came off. I couldn’t help but throw a quick look at the reggie going limp as the green glow dissipated, Minatsuki grabbing ahold of his other arm as well to sustain him, but it was enough to make me nauseous again — I ran off with my last breath.

 

Trying to find Canopus in the haunted remains of Jaula Blanca was the one logical thing I could think of. I had to come to the realization that I wasn’t sure I could trust Minatsuki on what he said about Koku having already left and the anxiety bubbled up in me once again. I went from room to room, from staircase to staircase, everywhere where the fire and the subsequent destruction would allow, and there really didn’t seem to be anyone there. The only thing I saw were corpses and corpses and corpses, but I was too tired to even take in all of it. I had never felt that tired before, my whole body permeated by the smoke’s raspiness and unpleasant smell, covered in dirt and ashes, having seen my imperfect but idyllic life crumble before me in a single night. I glanced back twice at every dead body, but none of them turned out to be either of the people I was looking for.

 

After discovering that Dr. Kazama wasn’t where he had been stabbed, a small flicker of hope ignited in me, only to be extinguished when I found him on the ground floor. Though he had lived a little longer than expected, he was gone for good. His body was sprawled on the floor but seemed relaxed, but maybe I just wanted to fantasize about him having died a peaceful death. 

 

In that moment of desolation, the only thing I could think of that put my mind at ease was Koku. He was the only thing, I thought, that could keep me going in a world like this, which made me even ignore the reality of the situation: that I didn’t know where he had gone, what would become of him, if he was even alive. All of that didn’t matter to me, perhaps out of self-indulgence, but it was the one way I could grasp at the last shreds of my sanity instead of sitting down and weeping. I found myself talking aloud.

 

“I’ll protect you… I promise…”

 

I said it over and over like a mantra as Jaula Blanca’s girders collapsed behind me from being consumed by the flames. The words fell from my mouth uncontrolled — but all the while my feet were leading me to the courtyard, where Regulus was waiting for me. Where Minatsuki was waiting for me.


	3. 3.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly shorter chapter this time, but I have trouble dividing up into pieces everything I want to write. I can't lump it all into one chapter or I'll never be able to keep it up. Also, one day I'm gonna slightly correct all of these, but I'm out of energy these days.
> 
> For the record, there's a reason Minatsuki is reading that dictionary, I guess you'll figure.

This all happened a long time ago, I could have barely been around ten, and thus my reminiscence of the events only persists in tracks. I know, factually, that Regulus had brought all of us away after the attack and for a while we were in a limbo between different locations, various rural hospitals where he seemed to have private offices and a few rooms to sleep in besides his own. I had gotten an odd knack for identifying reggies, there was something about their movements, their behaviour and their features they had in common which I was now good at pinpointing. Those were the instincts that revealed to me that most of those institutions were chock-full of them and Regulus had a particularly privileged position among them. It made sense — recreating the drug they craved so much required, besides extensive knowledge of chemistry, classified information that would have been hardly obtained by anyone uninvolved with Jaula Blanca. It wasn’t a secret that everyone in the research centre thought of reggies as subhuman. Regulus’s opinion didn’t differ a lot either, but he was better at concealing it, smiling so calmly and handing out vials of gold solution like a messiah. 

 

Details from around that time are scrambled; our environment changed too quickly. The next period I remember clearly was a few days — maybe even a week — after the attack. We, the kids, were stranded in Regulus’s office on that late afternoon, with a thunderstorm outside, rain hitting the window almost violently when the angle of the wind tilted too much. It was a room with an intriguing, gothic feel to it, but a terrible atmosphere that prodded at one’s sense of alarm. There were several bookshelves with all sorts of literature related to the natural sciences and big folders with endless arrays of documents. The desk stood next to the window with a padded armchair by it, while the other side of the office had a small bed positioned in it, presumably for patients. Regulus also seemed to have requested a worktable for chemical procedures, located by the wall on the opposite side to his desk; it had test tubes, containers, many different tweezers, a bunsen burner and a pair of plastic gloves arranged in an orderly way. He had, expectedly, a variety of medical equipment in different parts of the room, a bit more up-to-date comparing to Canopus’s. What puzzled me is that not everything in there was medicine-related: I saw more than one small solar system model, charts hung on the wall with the mass, density and composition of planets, schemes about lunar cycles, and many, many things I didn’t understand.

 

There was complete silence and stillness among us. Somebody should have gone and turned the lights on, because it was getting very dark in there due to the weather outside, but it was as if a mystical force was preventing us from moving. We looked pathetic, scattered in various points of the office, most of us sitting on the uncomfortable wooden floor; Yuna was curled up in a corner, hiding her face behind her elbows and a curtain of hair with her knees pulled up, I was slumped against one of the shelves with stretched out legs, and the reggie — who didn’t even have a name to our knowledge — was balled up and turning his back to us in the corner by the bed. The only one somewhat relaxed was Minatsuki; he was sat on Regulus’s padded chair, legs not long enough to reach the ground from it, flipping through a heavy tome placed on the desk in front of him that he had picked up earlier. 

 

We were, obviously, terrified. We had been for days. What had happened to all of us at Jaula Blanca wasn’t easy to shake off and our brains — mine for sure, at least — couldn’t digest it fully. In fact, I don’t recall us talking to each other at all before then, because we were the textbook definition of ‘traumatized’, in a complete mental block that reduced us to a herd of sheep Regulus was hauling around the countryside of Cremona. But this disconnection between all of us was becoming unbearable, especially since I hardly had a clue what was happening around me, so I finally spoke.

 

“What are we going to do?”

 

Minatsuki reacted way more quickly than I thought after shrugging his shoulders, while the other two ignored the question completely.

 

“Whatever Regulus says.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Where else would you want to go?” He didn’t even look towards me, immersed enough in whatever he was reading to be dismissive about something crucial.

 

I stood up and walked to him with slow steps without saying more for a while; I simply observed the huge, dusty book before him. It was a Latin dictionary — easily something a doctor would need — and I’m almost sure Minatsuki was just pretending to understand anything in it. 

 

“I don’t like this” I then said, with an honesty I knew he wouldn’t fancy.

 

“What?” He was still flipping pages, as if looking for something, mismatched eyes darting over the detailed descriptions of words.

 

“I don’t like that man. He got people killed—” my voice suffocated almost without notice, because the flashbacks of that horrible night came back to me swifter than anticipated.

 

Only now did Minatsuki look up, gaze directed strictly at my forehead by his self-imposed rules. He seemed irritated. I should have known by then that getting him in a bad mood wasn’t a good idea, but his appearance fooled me every time — whenever he wasn’t bringing about destruction and misery, even now, he had gone back to being a tame and odd-looking kid, one who would skim a difficult book to look smart. Regardless of what he could have done to me, I kept speaking louder and louder, because my exasperation had reached a limit.

 

“I don’t get why he killed everyone back then, I don’t get what’s going on, I don’t get why  _ you _ are killing people,—”

 

“What’s the big deal?” Minatsuki managed to interrupt me while still being quiet and seemingly uninterested in the conversation. “Didn’t you know people die all the time? Sometimes they deserve to.”

 

“W-why did Canopus deserve it?” I was sobbing by then, but he didn’t even lift a brow. Yuna and the reggie were completely still in their respective corners, either too afraid or asleep.

 

“He hurt me, so I killed him.” He turned back to the dictionary as I crumbled down, my hands were running through my hair in confusion, head feeling like it was going to explode.

 

“It makes sense that he would be nice to you,” he muttered before himself, “of course you wouldn’t want him to die.”

 

And the dialogue was cut off with that, because I realized nothing I said could change Minatsuki’s mind or make him explain more. I didn’t feel offended from being clueless about anything regarding my own life or his, not even from thinking he couldn’t have had a reason for doing what he did — as disgustingly selfish as it was, I was offended because he said he was my friend and he didn’t even trust me enough to let me in on his secrets. A part of me, a part that I hated, was boiling; for a second I wanted to snap once again for not getting any payback for being there for Minatsuki when no one else had been. I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and just sat back, waiting for Regulus’s return along with everyone, just like before. 

 

He came back eventually, manners still occasionally sweet in that horribly artificial way adults use for small children. Sometimes he was like this, sometimes strict and merciless, which was one more reason for me not to trust him. We were told to follow him, and while Yuna complied obediently (she had probably been awake the whole time), the reggie wouldn’t move and had to be forcibly yanked up by Minatsuki and dragged by the hem of his shirt. If we hadn’t been in such a horrifying and tragic situation, it would have looked funny, because he was a tiny bit taller than Minatsuki, and yet he was being brought around like a pet. Looking at his face made me feel like laughing a lot less — as we silently strolled on the clinic’s corridors — because he still seemed petrified from shock. In fact, the pale blonde boy was a mystery and barely able to sustain himself; he had to be fed and bathed, because although he looked fine at first glance, he lacked the willingness to do  _ anything _ without being pushed around. I wasn’t sure what Minatsuki had even done to him, but it was one of the few things I wasn’t curious about in the slightest.

 

It was then that the training sessions started, something not too worthy to be described in detail; they dragged on in the same way for years, exactly like the first time. Regulus made us run as a warmup in a larger and emptier room he had led us to, he had us spar and taught us how to use guns. He was anything but kind and gentle in these moments, especially when one of us would reach the limit of overexertion, being forced to stand up again and again and again, until we could barely feel our own muscles anymore. The punishment was pushups, too many of them for children this young. The reggie had a particularly hard time following instructions, and though I had no idea how much he could perceive of what was happening around him, I imagine it mustn’t have been pleasant to have both Regulus and Minatsuki yell at him at the same time — the latter felt both responsible for his failures and in his right to scold him for them. 

 

By the time the evening came and this not-so-pleasant group activity was over, we were completely drained. Despite how badly I wanted it to, sleep didn’t come. The attack’s events were still lingering in my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on the outside. I figured that must have been the case for everyone, considering I was the only one lying in my bed in the sober room we all shared. 

 

We were situated on the first floor of the clinic — which we would leave the day right after — and the end of the corridor where the room was led to a large balcony. The building itself wasn’t pretty at all, some shoddy, industrial style that looked more as if made for practicality rather than aesthetics. Outside, where I was dragging myself then in insomniac exhaustion, the ample area with ugly concrete tiles as a floor was surrounded by an iron railing eaten by rust. Minatsuki was there, leaning against it with his elbows in the dark of the night, turning his face towards the woods stretching before him in the distance and his back to me. This was the countryside where the pollution of Central Cremona didn’t reach, so the sky was scattered full of stars. I halted for a while. I wondered if Minatsuki was mad at me — whereas  _ I _ should have been mad at  _ him _ . 

 

“Izanami” he greeted me without turning around. I couldn’t tell how he had noticed me, but he seemed to have let the grudge go if he had had one. 

 

“I’m trying to find constellations,” he continued when I stepped closer without replying to him, “Regulus said I should learn them.”

 

“You do everything he says” I commented with annoyance, trying to reiterate what I had talked about before.

 

“It’s not a bad suggestion, why shouldn’t I?”

 

We didn’t talk for a few minutes, just stood on the balcony and looked at the stars, giving a false impression of peace. I remembered in moments like these that Minatsuki hadn’t really had the chance to see different views before, or to stand underneath a sky this beautiful; it must have fascinated him. I wasn’t going to blame him for at least this. 

 

“Izanami,” he said my name again then, same tone as earlier, “were you trying to replace Koku with me when you asked to be my friend?”

 

My heart sunk. The topic came completely out of left field and the blood was running cold through my body. 

 

“No” I lied. 

 

“I see,” Minatsuki sighed, “I’m glad. I was so afraid that was going to be the case.”

 

“What reminded you?” I asked with a whisper. 

 

“That’s what they wanted to do. Use me as a replacement for him.”

 

It wasn’t a detailed explanation — he would only give me one later — and yet I felt like I understood a lot from it. Even the stars seemed to glare at me suspiciously for being dishonest, but it was benevolently meant and Minatsuki almost,  _ almost _ seemed happy or relieved for a second, something I hadn’t seen since Jaula Blanca burned to the ground. I didn’t know what to say first, but I tried my best.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“You shouldn’t be,” he said, forgetting about the eyes — I had to shut mine, “there’s a way to make it right.”

 

I didn’t ask him about it; I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Instead I looked at the stars for a bit longer. They now stood out more against the night turning pitch black, then the wind had picked up, catching the tatters of the old uniforms we still wore and making them undulate at the same rhythm as the pine trees we could spot far away. I nodded his way, both as a sort of approval and a means of saying goodnight, ready to make my way back to the room. It was better for us not to talk more. 

 

I stopped abruptly halfway to the balcony door. There was something in the dark, against the outside wall of the building, that startled me so much I could barely make out what it was.

 

“Minatsuki,” I tried to calm down, “that guy… He’s still like that?”

 

My gaze was glued to the reggie curled up in the dark, looking fragile as ever, knees up and chin resting against them, face never having left that contorted expression of blank terror. He looked badly in the need to be taken care of, his legs were still covered in bruises he got either back when we left Jaula Blanca or from today’s training — I would have, if only I didn’t feel Minatsuki’s dangerous possessiveness whenever I got close to him, as if nobody was allowed to even look without his permission. I assumed he’d had the reggie follow him around everywhere not to lose track of him.

 

“Is he going to get better?” I asked again.

 

“I hope so.” Minatsuki said, casting the other a glance too. “Otherwise I’d have picked him up for nothing.”

 

“Why have you?”

 

“You’ll see when it works out. Just wait.”

 

I seemed to have reminded him; he suddenly walked past me, straight to his pet, pulling him up from the ground by a forearm. I watched them leave with a bad presentiment stuck in my throat as a wave of golden shine passed through the pale blonde bristles of the reggie’s nape when they got close enough to the inner lighting coming from the corridor. Then I was left on my own on the balcony, with nobody but the night enveloping me, gaining more questions at once than I got answers for.

  
_ Where else would you want to go? _ What else would I have wanted to do? There were no options, if I wanted to live. And so, as Minatsuki had told me to, I would wait.


	4. 4.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter turned out so goddamn long because there was a part I had already written earlier and I ended up shoving it in here because it fit more than what I was gonna do in the next one, so now it's twice as long as it should be. At the same time cutting it in half would have made it a bit like nothing had happened in part one and too much in part two...? My OCD is going off the charts now since the chapters are an uneven length. The great problems of my life. 
> 
> Most of this fic is Izanami being extremely traumatized by the crazy people around them but, I mean, anyone would be. I love writing it way too much though, I'm ridiculously attached to it considering there are like 2 people in total following it. Also, I'll get off my ass and tag it properly.

I wouldn’t call ours a  _ recovery _ . I knew the childish happiness I’d felt some of my days at Jaula Blanca would never come back, and that all we’d gone through would forever be etched into our minds, impossible to erase. But we did become at least more stable in the days — weeks — that followed, comparing to the mess we had been before. We had settled at an old nursing home, now functioning as yet another place of aggregation for reggies, which had a dose of conceptual irony to it since we did behave more like the elderly rather than a group of children, but it was overall a more pleasant place than any of the earlier ones. An older building, a big house atop a hill with a badly-kempt garden outside, climber vines running wild across the walls and tree trunks. From what I understood it was something Regulus used as a sort of vacation residence.

 

We looked like a hastily thrown-together family to anyone who saw us, especially during Spring when we used to have breakfast outdoors at that iron table with white paint coming away in pieces and a big umbrella on top to shade. Regulus didn’t spoil us with good food, but he didn’t let us starve either. We were often found there at eight in the morning, chewing on toast with bad quality jam, still not lively enough to engage in conversation on our own accord. Only when he asked a question did we — at least Minatsuki and I — answer, obediently. Making this a social situation was something he could have only done for his own amusement.

 

“Have you decided what to study yet?” He asked, one of those many mornings, with a smile I wish he never made because I found it sort of revolting. 

 

We sat there in contemplation for a while; Regulus had insisted that we all needed something we were educated on, and to pick different subjects if possible, because variety was what made a team functional. He didn’t give us specifics, and if I really had to choose from the bottom of my heart I would have wanted to engage in something literature-related, but not seeing the practical use of that in our situation made me shy away from expressing this wish. He was trying to build a group of fighters, after all, he had mentioned it a few times before.

 

“Medicine,” Minatsuki answered first, after swallowing the bite of toast in his mouth, “I want to know how that drug works.”

 

“What an excellent choice!” Regulus grinned wider. 

 

Of course, it didn’t take me long to figure out the intentions behind. At first I thought Minatsuki was just eager to please, but then my eyes darted to the reggie sitting across the table, who was now able to eat and take care of himself on his own despite staying completely mute. In ten years or less, he would have required the gold solution. The reason why Minatsuki insisted on keeping him around evaded me, but I was positive he was trying to do just that. 

 

“The rest of you? Izanami?” Regulus turned towards me, surprisingly pointing me out in particular. Though, admittedly, I was less out of my mind comparing to Yuna and the reggie — at least I was able to talk. 

 

“I don’t know” I said quietly, feeling uncomfortably scrutinized.

 

“It can be anything.”

 

“L-literature?” I finally blurted out, unsure. “Or something similar.”

 

“Good!” Every time he attempted to appear well-intentioned, it sent shivers down my spine. He turned to Minatsuki, making me wonder what plans he was in on that everyone else wasn’t. “That can be useful for what we need to do, no?”

 

“For sure” Minatsuki agreed before swallowing the last pieces.

 

Regulus was busy that day until noon so we had some free time before we would inevitably plunge into whatever private education he was planning to make us undergo — and then the training, of course, the part we all hated the most but never voiced it. 

 

The place was big and empty enough for all of us to have separate rooms. They were dusty and run-down, with furniture that hadn’t been used for decades, but Jaula Blanca’s hadn’t been a lot more luxurious and I was used to it. I picked a small and polite one; the wallpaper had faded yellow and green stripes and was loosening on the wall, one of the two cupboards had a half-broken leg and I could feel the mattress of the bed missing springs when I lied on it. Other than that, it was a pleasant and bright room, a good one to stay in during the day, though it got lonely and anxiety-inducing at nighttime. It was barely noticeable that I was living in it considering my lack of personal belongings; all I had was the change of clothes and pack of hygiene products Regulus had handed out. Both a little spartan — I assumed they were military resources, with the black pants, trekking boots and plain, white shirt. I didn’t feel in the position to be picky. 

 

I got an idea and stepped outside, there should have been a few empty hours left. Our rooms were scattered across the same floor, but I remembered their locations. I walked to the left, five doors from my own, then knocked and opened up carefully despite not receiving an answer, perhaps irreverent of me.

 

She was curled up in a bundle on the bed, long hair splayed around her on the pillow and sheets, looking so uncomfortable and out of place in the plain clothing we’d been given. The pants were rolled up on her thin ankles due to being too long, tiny, bare feet peeking out. I hoped I wasn’t bothering her; she didn’t react in any way when I came in.

 

“Yuna?”

 

A half-turn towards me and a dozy pair of eyes.

 

“I wanted to ask you if,—” Suddenly, I started feeling embarrassed. “If you were alright.”

 

She gave me a weak nod and I didn’t sense any agitation regarding my presence on her part, so I sat down on the side of the bed — it was a dirty and consumed but king-size one — at a distance from her.

 

“I know you’re probably still— We all are. It’s worse for you, but it will get better.” I paused as Yuna did nothing but blink softly; it was more like encouraging myself than talking to another person. “They—” I tried to glare in a way that would communicate to whom I was referring, “can’t kill us. Because they need us.”

 

I started to feel it, in that crummy bedroom with the sunlight filtering in, a tiny bit of hope that could lead me out of the current chaos. A few things, I only realized when I said them out loud; others had to have been some god-given intuition. At the time, it wasn’t clear to me what value me, Koku, Yuna and others like us represented, but what I knew for a fact, what I could  _ feel _ , was that both Regulus and Minatsuki relied on our presence too much to let go of us. I could have been a prepubescent kid, but I wasn’t entirely ignorant, and I knew someone with such an intense underlying malice wouldn’t have taken in orphans for no reason. Maybe Yuna understood as well, because I saw something lighting up in her expression as she sat up a little.

 

“I’m Izanami from the group,” I said, “do you remember me?”

 

She nodded again, but before I could add anything else, I heard her voice, thin and raspy and half-broken.

 

“He’s alive.”

 

“Who?” I asked quietly.

 

“Koku. He’s still alive.”

 

My heart skipped a beat, a plethora of buried and mitigated emotions resurfacing all at once.

 

“How do you know?”

 

“I can feel him. I feel everything he feels.”

 

I can’t recall if we talked more or what exactly happened afterwards; all I know is that at one point I was hugging Yuna and forcibly keeping myself from sobbing, putting my jealousy and doubt to the side to show gratitude for the vital force those phrases gave me. Koku was fine, and even if there was no proof I could have received for the statement, it felt incredible, almost cathartic to have someone confirm what I had been trying to convince myself of. I was on the verge of resignation before, but now I felt alive and I gained a new willingness to  _ do something _ — I didn’t know  _ what _ or  _ how _ , but I would remedy this situation. No, as odd as it was, I still didn’t hate Yuna. What I felt now was my love for Koku overflowing and rubbing off on her.

 

Regulus’s schedule, especially the trainings at the end of the day, did its best to run my newly-found enthusiasm into the ground. Physical exercise was harsher outside and I’ve never had the right constitution for endurance training; none of us did, in the beginning, as experiment subjects mildly underfed when the lack of funding decided so. Yuna immediately started lagging behind as we ran laps around the building, I wanted to stay back and lend her a hand but it would have gotten both of us punished. I saw the reggie’s blonde scalp glimmering — his hair shone so much in the sun despite how short it was — as he stopped and refused to move an inch farther. Since he’d gotten more or less back on his feet he’d had a few issues with obedience, warranting plenty of irritation from his alleged  _ owner _ . Obviously, his first reaction to running low on energy was interrupting his jogging which, biologically, would have been the right thing to do. He just functioned like that. 

 

“What are you doing? Continue” I heard Regulus shout at him from a few meters away before he sent him to do push-ups, an exercise that routinely made the boy collapse.

 

If there was anything that kept me hopping from one foot to another, it was some superhuman strength of mind I gained from the conversation about Koku but I, too, was caked in sweat. Even Minatsuki, with his unnerving ability to put up a tough front, was panting heavily and red in the face. Considering how little he’d been outside in his life it surprised me we were even running at the same speed. 

 

The evenings after became a distinct moment for me. Our scruffy group of four was even more of a disaster as we got back inside, drenched clothes and disarrayed hair. Yuna’s ponytail always came apart while Minatsuki’s long bangs stuck to his forehead, completely covering his eyes. There was a sort of communal bathroom on the corridor where we would silently engage in a provisory cleanup together. I helped Yuna with her hair on one end of the row of lined-up sinks, while the other two stayed at the other. As he put his head under the tap water and wrung his dark locks out, I wondered what Minatsuki was getting out of sticking to that strange reggie like a clam. 

 

Even now, as I was combing out rosey locks with my fingers and arranging them in a braid, he monitored the other boy obsessively, making sure he had washed all the sweat off his face. I saw him freeze for a few moments, palms still resting on the porcelain as he turned to the reggie and just stared at him, made him flinch out of fear of having made a mistake. Minatsuki then blinked at the mirror a few times, and a pale boy with one azure eye and incredibly wet locks gazed back. He reached out and ran a fingertip across the other’s bristles.

 

“You should grow out your hair” I heard his voice resonate among the white tiles of the walls. 

 

By then I knew that meant the reggie would, inevitably, — grow out his hair. Minatsuki had ways of dealing with people who didn’t do as he said, even if it was about something inconsequential like this. It took one slip of whatever his eye did. It was subtle but I had noticed; regardless of the issue, he hated being contradicted. 

 

We spent at least a few months in that place, if not half a year. Whenever Regulus took us anywhere more distant than the fifty-meter radius of the house it was brief and not particularly enjoyable for us, albeit barely anything in this type of life was, in the end. We went hunting sometimes and I had the vague feeling it was his own pastime that he tried to disguise as something educative for us. We hid in bushes, each of us with a rifle too big for our short arms, as Regulus shot the umpteenth rabbit to ‘show us how’. I’ve always suspected there was something wrong with him, and when I saw the glimmer in his eyes as he grasped the bloodied animal on the ground, it was as though a fear of mine had physically manifested. His fingers dug into the rabbit’s neck with a twitch, so utterly fixated he had started ignoring us. I had never liked him and now he didn’t get the benefit of the doubt from me either.

 

Minatsuki was good at hunting, the King’s eye had very sharp vision. He shut his other eye, the grey one, before pulling the trigger — the result was many rabbits just like Regulus’s, a fox or two and once a deer. Us three, Yuna, the reggie and I, were too scared to do it at first. We would eventually get the hang of it though, and I think this was what ultimately familiarized us with killing; one day, several weeks later, my rifle would fire and take an unfortunate fox’s life away, which Regulus seemed very pleased with. It wasn’t even an adult, a ridiculously easy target almost, but it was the first step towards that skim of apathy one needed to murder in cold blood. I always had an instinct to look away when I did. To not face the consequences. But in reality we were there, four kids and an adult with dubious sense of responsibility in the woods nearby the residence, tired and deep-down triumphant — and the fox was as dead as one could be. 

 

“Good one, Izanami” Regulus picked it up by the skin of its neck like a mother appearing too late. I was possibly the least happy with this outcome among us all.

 

But fate, life, god — whatever it was — wanted us to eventually give in. We aligned ourselves with Regulus’s wishes and started turning into something closer to the group he had in mind. Training became more bearable with time, we could shoot quickly and efficiently, and the general shock-ridden atmosphere turned into relative stability. Ever since we spoke, I had acquired a need to look out for Yuna, but from a certain point onwards her improvements picked up so much they left me baffled: she caught up with our stamina and learned to handle weapons with ease unexpected of a delicate girl. As we sparred and her knife almost sliced through my protection gear, I started wondering how she had become so determined — I imagined she must have been thinking about Koku and going back to him, same as me. Since I was convinced I still loved him with the same intensity, it almost made me ashamed for not being as good as her. All the while Minatsuki and his reggie were still perpetually focused on each other, the latter having started to mutter a few words here and there; basic ones, but it was much more than before. 

 

We were going on to late Summer the first time I really conversed with him face-to-face. The moments when Minatsuki’s watchful, predatory eye didn’t monitor his every action were few and it was only due to luck if I caught him in one of them. The house had a big salon on ground level, another place that hadn’t been used for too long; there were a few pieces of antique furniture to give a semblance of tastefulness, but not too many, hinting at how this used to be an institution running on strict government money. There was a corner in that room where an old-fashioned record player had been placed on a small table with an egregious amount of vinyl discs both on the shelf nearby and piled on the floor underneath. A damaged record of the Raindrop prelude by Chopin had been put on — probably the first thing one would find among them — interrupting with blank pauses and scratching noises on occasion.

 

He was there with that outwardly dazed, inscrutable expression he always wore, cross-legged on an aged chair on the brink of falling apart. I had to take note of how, just as I thought, he had followed what he had been ordered: his soldierlike haircut had grown into a longer, uneven platinum fluff, bringing out a charm I hadn’t noticed he had before. It almost made me concerned how calm he was comparing to his rebellious moments. It was the same boy I had watched go through the harshest form of disciplining, trying to break out of it every time and being pushed back either by Regulus’s lack of mercy or Minatsuki’s tyrannical attitude. I think how I saw him changed drastically on that early weekend afternoon. My vision of him as an animalistic creature morphed into that of something eerily mysterious, not irrational out of stupidity but because his way of thinking was beyond my personal understanding.

 

“What are you doing here?” I asked the question which, when I said it out loud, sounded dumber than I wanted it to.

 

His eyes, as he looked at me, were that usual bright, glowing blue, saturated with a deep sense of peace I wouldn’t have had the strength for with what he went through on the daily.

 

“Listening” he replied in a distracted tone after he was done examining me.

 

“Does he let you…?” I gestured with a lift of chin to the side.

 

He only nodded slowly and balanced himself on his elbows as he leaned on the table, staring out the window next to it. The nursing home was situated in an area with good climate and it was mostly very bright outside, but this angle was even better-illuminated at the current hour and for a moment I watched on with stupor, half-blinded. The rays of light seeped in with particles of dust floating in them like sparkles, hitting his unmoving face soothed by the muffled melody of the record player. He looked a bit like one of those angels in classical paintings.

 

“Do you like music?” I asked to dissipate the tension because the ethereal image before me was frankly making me uneasy.

 

“I guess,” he said without his gaze leaving the window, “it makes me calm.”

 

It was a moment I thought back to for years, especially because it directly connected to the evening afterwards, so abyssally different in tone it would have come as a shock that not only one but two of its participants were the same people.

 

Ever since we had been stranded together like this, us four Jaula Blanca survivors, something had been rubbing me the wrong way about Minatsuki’s endeavours with the nameless boy. How wouldn’t it have, after all; even if I didn’t want to acknowledge it, I knew he had brainwashed him. I knew his power had to fall vaguely between those lines. I was only too dead terrified to want to find out the extent, but living with him, it was a reality I couldn’t escape. 

 

What happened hours later made me realize without a doubt. It was a scene I oversaw around nine in the evening by accident, through a door left open in a gap just big enough for me to peer through. No matter where we had stayed at, I noticed Minatsuki paid a lot of attention to closing doors behind himself, so the detail tipped me off. It was left like that because there was something more urgent to do, that much became evident from what was unfolding before me.

 

Minatsuki and his reggie were inside one of the uninhabited rooms in an atmosphere I could only describe as utter chaos. The latter was yelling incoherent, animalistic sounds as he seemingly tried to destroy anything around himself, and although it wasn’t much considering how sparsely furnished the place was, Minatsuki was making an inhumane effort in trying to restrain him to prevent damage. They weren’t really fighting each other, because the reggie was barely paying attention to the other’s presence. His fit came from an apparent alarm and despair engulfing him so much it was doubtful he was even aware somebody was trying to catch him.

 

“You are an incredible annoyance,” Minatsuki panted quietly as he finally grabbed an arm that twisted itself out of his grip in the course of seconds.

 

The only response he received was a sort of angered grunt and the chase continued onwards, both the boys bumping into every piece of furniture with their movements. I didn’t dare to interfere. Finally, with an abrupt movement, the reggie was thrown against a wall, falling on the ground before it from the collision. I could hear their breathing in the tense few moments when Minatsuki walked up to him with slow steps; the reggie’s leg twitched in an attempt to stand up and his mouth opened, about to make more noise.

 

“Stay there!”

 

I had never heard Minatsuki yell like that before. It positively baffled me. His voice, usually quiet, muffled and reserved, took on a completely different tone when freely let out — the other boy must have been startled as well, wincing as his movements halted. The distance between the two decreased as Minatsuki stopped, looming directly above him and staring below with an aloof, irritated frown. He let out a sigh and knelt down, as if he was being merciful.

 

“Didn’t I tell you before not to make a scene?”

 

“I—” was all the reggie managed to respond, I could see, myself, that he didn’t know what to say. In his state of mind, it wasn’t like there  _ was _ an argument to be made. Talking about the hell of pushed down frustration and agony he was going through wouldn’t get his owner to act differently.

 

“Regulus will kick you out if he sees you like this.”

 

It didn’t help, only made him emit a tiny gasp and shiver up, cowering back as much as the wall behind him allowed when Minatsuki reached out with his left to cup his cheek. Had I not known them, it would have looked affectionate. 

 

“No no no no no…” the reggie murmured erratically; though I couldn’t see from where I was, I assumed from the greenish light reflecting on his face that the King’s eye was being activated. His panic was to no avail.

 

The procedure was a brief one. Minatsuki probably didn’t change a lot, only the bare minimum to get the other to calm down. Sometimes he gave me the impression he wasn’t used to utilizing those powers just yet and was being cautious, not daring to make the manipulation too drastic. He let himself go with it step by step, growing more confident — in what I later figured out was modifying memories — as years went by.

 

The reggie’s expression turned chillingly relaxed when he was done, the tense muscles of his body loosening as he slouched against the wall, limp. Minatsuki’s palm was still on his face, but his thumb eased its pressure on the area under his eye — as if he was trying to be soft on a whim and didn’t really know how to. They remained like that for a few seconds, and only by chance did I spot the small tear rolling down the reggie’s cheek, diverted by the other’s hold on it. 

 

“Are you still scared?” Minatsuki asked in a deeper voice. He never put emotion behind his words, but a charitable part of me liked to think it was just beyond his capabilities. 

 

I was already barely breathing behind the doorframe, but then Minatsuki did something I wasn’t expecting. He pulled the reggie in, so that his horrified face was pressed against his chest, making his wet gaze freeze in a vacant numbness; it was hard to tell whether he was hugging him or just keeping him in place, it looked so wrong either way. Minatsuki’s fingers were stroking the choppy, light-blonde hair on the other’s nape, making him quiet down definitively. I couldn’t tell who was more terrified between him and me.

 

“I’m here,” said Minatsuki, like he was addressing an unruly pet with condescending benevolence, “I care about you.”

 

I prayed and prayed and prayed. Prayed that he wouldn’t say more, anything with more weight than that, because it was clear he was throwing around words he didn’t know the meaning of. What he did wasn’t  _ caring about someone _ , I wanted to yell it at him, I wanted to have the strength to go up to him and confront him, but I was too petrified to move. 

 

The next morning proceeded like nothing had even happened. I felt like I was going insane at the breakfast table, not daring to talk or even look at the two of them. They acted so quiet, so  _ normal _ it was tearing my nerves into pieces. I was still thinking back to the reggie’s face painted in fear, to that dim-lit room and the flash of green — the images wouldn’t leave my mind, I had slept terribly. I could barely push the buttered bread down my throat without an urge to retch. 

 

“We need to settle with fighting styles as well,” Regulus cut my ruminations short, “that, especially, needs a lot of diversity.” We all looked at him as he paused to swallow a bit of sausage (his breakfast was always different and more nutritious than ours). “You should all decide on something that fits your natural skills. For example you, Minatsuki—”

 

“I’d do well with one-handed swords.” I glared in confusion as the reggie suddenly interrupted Regulus, who also lifted a brow at what was probably the longest sentence the other had uttered up to that point. Minatsuki was the only one who didn’t show any surprise, only finished his food and followed up shortly;

 

“I confirm what  _ Minatsuki _ says.”

 

Yuna was searching for eye contact to get an explanation I couldn’t give her; life was turning into a fever dream and I was hit with the sensation, once again, of not understanding  _ anything _ .

 

“I figure kids your age like playing these silly games, huh?” Regulus gave a belated pretend-smile. “Just don’t make it too confusing.”

 

The boy with Koku’s eyes looked up again, serious down to every breath as though he was issuing a divine commandment.

 

“Not at all, it’s simple. He’s Minatsuki,” he nodded towards the reggie, leaving a tense, open pause before adding the next half in a lower voice.

 

“And my name is Laica.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, there's no particular reason why it had to be Raindrop, I just recall Gilbert preferring oldschool rock so I tried thinking of a classical record someone who doesn't listen to a lot of classical music would own. 
> 
> At least we got to the name switch, whew.


	5. 5.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have literally no cognition of how much I'm writing in these chapters. It's just... Fuck regular length division, I guess. Can you believe it was supposed to be even longer? Then I found a way to put the dramatic cliffhanger in the middle of the planned out episode so I'll just write the rest in the next chapter. 
> 
> There's a warning for corporal punishment for this one. Just in case. It's not like one wouldn't expect massive amounts of mistreatment of children in a fic where it's Gilbert raising them, but you know.
> 
> I've been having some massively shitty days but writing for BTB allows me to vent to such an incredible degree I'm honestly amazed and I would have probably offed myself by now if I couldn't. So yeah, the fic will continue on. Optimism!

Minatsuki.

 

Minatsuki.

 

_ Minatsuki. _

 

Who was Minatsuki? I had no idea myself. I remembered Canopus mentioning something like this when we used to gather around him and ask him questions about science; self-conditioning. It’s said that if you repeat something enough times it becomes true just by virtue of you convincing yourself of it, through reliance on thought mechanisms that are too subconscious and elementary for you to be aware of them. In much the same way, my conception of who Minatsuki was managed to shift gradually. You could make a dog drool at the sound of a bell in about ten minutes; for me to attribute a name to a completely different person, it took barely two weeks.

 

I was surprised at how easily I got used to it. Of course, I began thinking to myself almost spontaneously, Minatsuki is the scrawny boy with that distinct, straw-coloured hair which now almost reaches his chin. The one who gets very wild in sparring sessions, purposely ignores the rules and gets punished for it, only to do the exact same thing a day later. The one who has listened to all of Regulus’s vinyl records and then has the gall to criticize his taste in music, even though he probably has never heard anything else. The one who’s always around the shy-looking kid called Laica.

 

I wasn’t an idiot, nor was I an amnesiac. ‘Laica’ hadn’t done anything to me either; admittedly, I might have felt a lot more in touch with reality if he had and I could have just lived with the seemingly timeless assessment about which name belonged to whom. If only I hadn’t had vivid and intact memories about the time Laica used to have his original name — not a Latin word I was convinced he had picked at random — and the fear associated with the  _ real _ Minatsuki, the life-threatening tension. The reason I’m able to say all of this, all that I’ve said so far, is that I carefully kept in mind the image of the boy with the King’s eye murdering Canopus a few meters from me, his angering outward apathy and his mistreatment of whoever it was he gave his name to. 

 

And so, if someone now asked me who Minatsuki is, I still wouldn’t be able to give a clear answer.

 

One or two months later we were supposed to move on from Regulus’s alleged weekend residence, but it just so happened that the weather took a downturn in all of Cremona for entire weeks. I heard him call it a ‘universal flood’ with a lot of frustration as he would often sip on a cup of coffee while looking through the windowglass from the salon. There were regular storms, our little group was stranded in the house with the trainings called off day after day. It vaguely reminded me of that one time in the office, except we were vastly more functional and accustomed to the circumstances. Half-deteriorated reggies would come and go with food and supplies; I heard someone’s car got into an incident from the intense rain once, resulting in what mustn’t have been a pleasant death. Regulus’s entire reaction, when he was told the news, was a little frown and a short comment on how we would run out of bread at this rate. 

 

He had a sort of obsession with making use of every minute of our time, and so that period was spent on studies, which were perhaps more hellish than even jogging. Regulus had us sit in a makeshift classroom of sorts — an emptier room with an aggregation of different tables brought from elsewhere to serve as desks — and we would solipsistically take notes of whatever textbook fit our interests. He supervised us heavily; the reason, I believe, was Minatsuki and his tendency to do anything other than what he was told as soon as Regulus turned around the corner. His behavioral problems grew brazen so subtly I barely noticed, but the change was a remarkable one if I thought about it enough; he started out simply disobeying, but now he was outright bold-faced, giving Regulus suggestions he didn’t ask for and putting his orders up for debate. Laica had become more introverted if that was even possible, letting the conflicts between the two play out with a look of complacency only I could notice.

 

“There are pages missing” Minatsuki cut through the dead silence of the room, flailing the tenth chapter of the history book between his fingers.

 

“Just skip them” Regulus dismissed him from the chair in the corner, reading some kind of medical manual. 

 

“I won’t understand what’s afterwards if I’m skipping a part.”

 

“And what am I supposed to do about that,” he then forced a smile in response, “ _ Minatsuki _ ?”

 

He put so much mocking emphasis on every syllable of that name that even Yuna had to place her pen on the table to watch. We looked at each other as if to communicate that yes, we knew this was the point they would start making a scene. Minatsuki was quarrelsome enough on his own, but Regulus’s patience tended to grow thin with children and the combination of these two things wasn’t always pleasant.

 

“Get me a new book.” 

 

Looking back, it makes perfect sense how Minatsuki ended up doing well as a leader; it was something in the way he leaned back in his chair, how he put his foot on the table stretcher and two interlocked hands behind his nape. Demanding that others do things for him in such an insolent way came natural to him — though I wasn’t sure what ‘natural’ meant here, because was this a resurfacing trait or did it come from Laica scrambling his head? I never found out, but it worked. Except with Regulus. 

 

“Surely, you have at least the brains to guess from context,” he sneered as he stood up to go right to Minatsuki’s desk and look him in the eyes, “or are you reggies a little slow with such things?”

 

He knew how to hit where it hurt. Every time he got out of hand, Regulus would reiterate this topic, aware that it would jab at Minatsuki’s self-esteem — and of course it did, it was obvious. But Minatsuki was the kind of person who glared right back at him and lifted his eyebrows in a way that looked even more condescending than if he had just told the man his opinion was worthless. He didn’t respond anything, but he  _ did _ push a strand of nearly shoulder-length blonde hair behind his ear and shrugged. It was the one thing he shouldn’t have done. Regulus slapped Minatsuki so hard he fell out of his chair.

 

As the situation devolved in the same way we’d seen countless times before, I suddenly found myself focused on something other than the reprimands yelled into the air. I looked at Laica instead. He displayed an intrigue with the scene devoid of emotional involvement, chin in one hand while still sketching up a scheme about oxidation with the other. I had no idea what he was thinking, as always. Shouldn’t he have been angry? Worried? He behaved so calmly all the time that I almost,  _ almost _ managed to convince myself he was unable to feel emotions. I wish I could have kept thinking that until the end. 

 

It always ended with Minatsuki on a timeout. He came back from them with a contained face and a grit of teeth almost perfectly masked because submitting to Regulus’s public humiliation while acknowledging it hurt him was something he systematically refused to do. Him and Laica set off for the few free hours of the day in silence, Minatsuki sometimes struggling to walk from being hit in the wrong place; it wasn’t the heaviest corporal punishment, but he was a bit of a delicate kid. The way Laica had resorted to simply silently observing for so much time now was giving me increasing uneasiness, but I brushed it off by telling myself that  _ at least _ he wasn’t doing damage. 

 

I stuck to Yuna as we left the ‘classroom’, both of us jolting up from a rumble outside as the sound of pouring rain resonated in the dark house, monotonous. The weather wasn’t improving, I considered all of those background noises by then. Watching so much violence play out on the daily created an atmosphere of seriousness between the two of us as well — besides the fact that Yuna had always been sort of quiet, which might have just been a reasonable attitude to take on around Regulus. I developed a sense of admiration for her. She was perfectly moderate and an excellent fighter while retaining that air of feminine sensitivity. I found myself spacing out and staring at her more and more with the odd, lingering feeling that I shouldn’t logically have been so fond of her if rivalry in love worked the way it should have. 

 

“This gets so nasty each time” I sighed as soon as we got to our corridor, which gave me an impression of safety somehow.

 

“I don’t get why he does it.” Yuna replied after a brief pause while we kept walking. “Why Minatsuki acts like that.”

 

“A way to get back at Regulus, maybe.” It was something I said without paying attention, but a moment later I was glad I had because there was more sense in it than I thought. 

 

She stopped suddenly, in a few seconds that felt completely surreal, gazing so deeply into my eyes it could have torn me apart. As though she had gotten an important idea. Her mouth was moving in the half-shadows cast by the frayed curtains but no sound came out; she changed her mind, evidently. After exhaling, Yuna simply said;

 

“We should talk in my room, Izanami.”

 

My heart was hammering in my chest, clueless as to what I should have expected, but I nodded. If Yuna was going to tell me something important, it would have at least made me feel more alive after how crushingly depressing the past months had been; maybe it was news about Koku, one of those things she just  _ knew _ through some mystical power of hers. And so I followed, entering that odd little hole with the huge bed in it where she’d been living since we moved here. Yuna looked around twice outside before shutting the door behind us, sitting next to me on the bed and turning to me with the same meaningful look on her face from before. 

 

“Please don’t—” Her words were hurried and almost whispered, flipping her head to the side with a sudden insecurity as she cut off. “Don’t take me for crazy, okay?”

 

“I won’t” I attempted to sound as soft and reassuring as possible.

 

“Is it only me or he wasn’t always like this?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Minatsuki” she looked back into my pupils, making me flinch.

 

“Which one?” I managed to ask after a pause. Yuna seemed suddenly overwhelmed with the kind of relief one gets when a puzzle clicks.

 

“So it really happened?” She said, louder this time from shock. “The names… I thought I was going mad. Nobody talked about it.”

 

It was true, I had been feeling the same way. I put a hand on her shoulder gently to offer all the comfort I could while being slightly intimidated and flustered by her presence. 

 

“That reggie… His personality changed. Something happened to both of them. Maybe  _ between _ them.” Her brows knitted with determination, but I could feel my own palm growing cold and sweaty on her from nervousness. She was getting so close — but I didn’t want to tell her. She didn’t deserve to live with this paranoia the way I did.

 

“There’s something else, Izanami.” She suddenly grabbed me by both upper arms, eyes sparkling with something akin to childish excitement. I got a little startled. “Do you know what the Jetblack Epitaph is?”

 

“I… heard of it” I responded while digging up the relevant memories from Jaula Blanca.

 

“Canopus talked about it, remember? The way we were born is written there.”

 

I was still surprised to see Yuna so hung up on something; it wasn’t typical of her. The information to remember about the Jetblack was very little because it was a topic Canopus preferred to avoid. Obviously, one can’t just explain to a group of children the details of their own artificial birth; but given the way that inscription would shape our lives I assumed they were going to tell us successful ones if we had remained in Jaula Blanca longer. From what I knew it was a collection of cryptic legends, most of them had ongoing disputes in academic circles about their interpretation; the stone tablet also codified genetic details that clued in researchers about how Koku and Yuna had to be created. They were the first subjects with a positive outcome, the other eleven — including me — had been based on them. 

 

“Do you think the Jetblack is somehow connected to  _ those two _ ?” I asked with a mutter as the grip of Yuna’s petite hands still didn’t loosen on me.

 

“Ah no,” she let go then, “not both of them. Or, well, maybe.” I saw her take a glance at the small window before continuing. “I overheard Regulus say a lot of things about the Jetblack, it was a few days ago… That it determined people’s fate.”

 

“It might be dangerous to tell me this” I lowered the volume of my voice.

 

“I thought you could help, Izanami.” Yuna continued nonetheless. “Minatsuki, the one who’s Laica now, he’s the one Regulus was saying this to. I don’t know why they talk in private. I’m so confused.”

 

“I used to hang out with him, I guess you’re aware.” I tried to extinguish the last traces of sadness in the way I said it. 

 

“That’s why I asked you.” She looked so hopeful for an answer I was tempted to explain everything for a moment. 

 

“I don’t know what they’re planning” I said with a sorrowful honesty. “I’ve been around Mina— Laica before, but I’m not sure I really  _ knew him _ . I don’t think anyone does.”

 

That put a moment of silence between us as the thunderstorm continued on and the rain hit the windowsill with more intensity periodically. It would have been easy to mistake my temporary inability to talk as compassion towards Laica, but any feeling resembling that had been long replaced with dread in my heart. I started admitting it to myself — I was constantly terrified he would change my memories one day. If the attack had happened around those times, I would have been less sure about wanting to save him, no matter how bad that sounded. Yuna’s paper-thin voice shook me up as a lightning flashed through the room. 

 

“ _ The man chosen by the two shrine maidens gained power, companions and wings, and became the black-winged king. _ ”

 

My eyes went wide as I looked at her. It wasn’t hard to figure out what she was quoting, but along with the ambience between those walls it made it hard for me to breathe, yet I was unable to stand up or move an inch.

 

“ _ Their purpose fulfilled, the two maidens presented to him a blade that burned blue. ‘Decapitate one of us,’ they said. _ ”

 

Suddenly, my head felt dizzy and I almost toppled off the bed, muscles regaining composure in the last second before I would fall. The anxiety I felt could have only been compared to that of my last night at Jaula Blanca, except looming and ominous; my inhales turned into soundless wheezes as I gripped the side of the mattress. 

 

“I tried to memorize all of it, but I can’t remember mo— Izanami?!” 

 

My head whipped up as my sense of stability returned to me, though I was still zoning out. Yuna was shaking me gently, face full of genuine worry; we waited like that for a while, before I could properly breathe again, puzzled as to what had just happened. I never would have thought that even reciting the text could have this effect on me. I didn’t know the meaning or the context of the excerpts, but they put me in such panic it wasn’t unreasonable to assume there were mystical forces involved. 

 

Then, Yuna froze, her entire body going stiff. For a moment, I was left confused. 

 

“I was told to tell you,” I heard a voice from the door frame that was neither of ours, “Regulus wants to talk to us.”

 

I rapidly crawled back on the bed up to about the middle of it from total panic, sheets pooling up where my feet kicked. 

 

“...Why?” Yuna simply asked, unperturbed.

 

Laica shrugged his shoulders as he stood there with his now slightly less sickly-looking face, our standard clothing a little baggy on him. It seemed like neither of us had seen him come in. I got the angering suspicion he hadn’t knocked on purpose, exploiting his talent of sneaking up on people. 

 

“Right now?” Came from Yuna.

 

“Yeah.”

 

We both started getting up simultaneously, when suddenly Laica turned towards me.

 

“Not you, Izanami.” I glared at him suspiciously, to which he repeated; “Only Yuna and I.”

 

I was filled with foreboding as I returned to my own room. I figured the studying would be called off for the time being as Regulus was busy communicating whatever he had to, and I’ve never felt loneliness so excruciatingly as in those hours. I spent a few minutes looking for Minatsuki, just out of a need for human company, but he was nowhere to be found. It dawned on me that he could also be wherever Yuna and Laica were, given that him and Laica almost always moved around together. I was sprawled on my badly-maintained mattress as I mused on the possibility, rolling around as my chin dug into the pillow. It smelled stale.

 

That part of me I tried to ignore so often was irritated. Everyone knew something. Everyone was in on something. Everyone had the possibility to act all mysterious and cast those annoying, chilling glances throughout the day as if they had acquired all the secrets of the universe — except me. Yuna knew what was happening with Koku. Laica knew about something Regulus was trying to do. Minatsuki; well, he probably knew everything Laica knew considering the two stuck together like an enlightened two-person cabal among us. I was the only one who never knew  _ anything _ and had to fall from one pit of disorientation to the other continuously. I had grown so impatient it made me clench the bedcover in my palm. Why were they leaving me out? The rationality that would have told me that getting involved with Regulus wasn’t generally a _ good thing  _ completely left me as I spurred myself into negative thinking almost to the point of tears. 

 

If there was something I regret deeply, it’s having been so preoccupied with myself in those hours.

 

The next time I saw any of them was dinner, a moment of the day that was already among the most uncomfortable ones in itself, and now the tension in the air could have been cut with the knife Regulus was piecing up his steak with. The only thing resonating in the salon were the storm’s incessant noises outside; we all seemed to be too busy spooning boiled peas in our mouths with rigid movements. Nobody talked for excruciatingly long.

 

I could sense that something had happened and I was desperately trying to read everyone’s faces to understand. I instantly noticed Yuna was missing but I didn’t dare to ask where she was — at this point I was scared out of my mind. The other three seemingly decided to keep up their odious act of neutrality; Regulus was unaffected by anything and everything (though I wouldn’t have expected any different), Laica was completely enigmatic and Minatsuki’s biggest worry seemed to be his disgust towards the food that he demonstrated by visibly scowling at every mouthful. I can’t tell where I found the strength to eat in that state. I was reaching a breaking point and so the question simply escaped me beyond my control.

 

“Where’s Yuna?”

 

“In her room,” Regulus sighed, “she’s feeling a little sick right now.”

 

“What happened to her?” I must have been paling from the outside.

 

Laica had opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again when Minatsuki anticipated him. 

 

“Why would have something happened to her?” 

 

“I know it did…” I mumbled, though it could be heard very clearly without anybody speaking a word.

 

“You weren’t there, were you?” Minatsuki shrugged, only to continue rolling around peas on his plate with distaste.

 

As soon as the meal was officially over I immediately ran to Yuna’s room, bursting in with cold sweat soaking my shirt. There was a bit of current before I shut the door since the window was open, letting the rain fall inside when the wind picked up and creating a puddle on the area in front of it. I felt immensely relieved when I caught a glimpse of her long hair blown about; she sat on the floor in a similar fashion as in the first days of Regulus picking us up. If I had been less alarmed, I would have asked something like ‘Are you alright?’ or ‘Did something happen?’ — but my bad presentiments were ahead of me with deductions when I blurted out what I ended up saying, almost with a scream.

 

“What did they do to you?!”

 

Yuna’s head lifted up before she spoke. My eyes met a pair of deep red irises.

 

“Who are you?”


	6. 6.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Half a week of suicidal depression will NOT keep me from writing BTB fic. 
> 
> Today's dish is Somebody Finally Called Laica Out and More Kids Beating Each Other Up. Some more izayuna sprinkled in there. Gilbert just keeps being a fucking asshole I guess, but aren't we already used to it.

The house had three floors and I ran through all of them. Every corridor echoed with the sound of those ugly combat boots I’d been forced to wear, and at a time like this the whole place was hollow, not even the usual reggie or two walking around. No matter how long we’d been living in it, it still sort of looked like a haunted house, with scraped walls and creaking floors. The clouds rumbled outside as I rushed, starting to breathe more frantically despite all the training — it was a big building and trying to map all of it as fast as I was took a lot of energy. 

 

It was the last thing I cared about. I stopped abruptly sometimes, slamming doors open and swallowing my disappointment and frustration after finding empty rooms behind them. Describing everything I was feeling would be hard. The panic was overwhelming comparing to the rest, but I was also  _ livid _ , I couldn’t deny that much. I had been to almost all parts of the house that could be — or that we had — used for something, but I wasn’t finding anyone anywhere. The night was setting in; I knew that if the person I ended up finding was Regulus, my running around wouldn’t have gone without repercussions, but it really wasn’t relevant to me then. 

 

I was about to give up when I arrived at the kitchen, but there my search came to an end. Like a charm, I spotted two forms, not really conversing but rather as though what I interrupted was some peaceful moment of silence between them. There was a dining table in there as well — though we didn’t use it — and Minatsuki was sat on top of it with one leg crossed over the other in childish irreverence, half a cup of coffee placed on the surface next to him. Laica had retreated into the background, politely occupying the chair at the table end and sipping on his own warm drink cryptically. They looked at me with almost the same expression, an unimpressed raise of eyebrows, the moment I burst in, doing nothing but panting in the doorway for a while. 

 

“You did it to her too!” I started talking without thinking it through or assessing what I was aiming for with this confrontation. 

 

“Izanami,” Minatsuki sighed, an attempt at being assertive and condescending, “what exactly is your pro—”

 

“Shut up! This isn’t about you!” I snapped, leaving him so dumbfounded by my lack of patience he uncrossed his legs. I turned towards Laica, seething. “Don’t think I don’t know.”

 

His eyes went slightly wider when I addressed him, probably in the process of coming up with a new method to divert attention from himself — but I wasn’t going to let him. I realized he’d go the route of ignoring me when he didn’t answer for uncomfortably long, so I walked straight to him, leaning across the table from the side towards his face. 

 

“I know it’s the memories,” the rage reduced my voice to a whisper, “I figured it out. You better explain to me what you m-made her think…” 

 

As Laica showed no reaction to my words, I was losing a bit of courage. It was absurd, unconceivable how little he cared as all he did when he saw my emotional outburst was pushing an overgrown strand of his bangs behind his ear. It made me boil all over again and resort to yelling, just a few centimeters of distance between us.

 

“Don’t just sit there, Minatsuki!”

 

The other boy — the one who now responded to that name — leaned in a little, puzzled but still silent. Finally, there was something akin to a sigh coming from Laica before he spoke calmly.

 

“We should discuss this another time.”

 

“There’s no other time! We’re talking right now or else— Or else…”

 

I knew he could have dismissed me because I really didn’t have anything to threaten him with, not anything I was aware of at least. And yet Laica dragged himself up from the chair slowly, gulping down the rest of the coffee (which was doubtfully a good idea to drink past ten in the evening). He looked at Minatsuki and there was something mysterious playing across their faces, like they had a way of communicating beyond my senses.

 

“Izanami only feels comfortable talking to me.”

 

“Got it,” Minatsuki resigned with an exhale, hopping off from where he was perched, “I’ll leave.”

 

After he walked out, the silence in the kitchen grew heavy as lead. Laica seemed almost out of it as he was busy trailing the shadows of bugs circling the lamp with his gaze, supporting himself on the table with one palm. I knew everything he would say — and said — was extensively pondered on. Every time he waited before speaking I could only imagine him making endless calculations about the most appropriate thing to declare, whether it was some silly life strategy or damage control I couldn’t tell. The rule stood; I didn’t look him in the eyes. But I still did my best to show him how much I wanted to take him into pieces with my stare because I was exasperated and furious at him, fuelled by my need to mask the hollow sadness I felt for Yuna. 

 

“I’ll tell him, too, later.” I ended up saying. “You can’t avoid it.”

 

“Why are you getting involved when you don’t even understand what’s happening?” He left a slight pause for effect. “You know it will hurt you in the end.”

 

“That’s why I’m here. So you’ll tell me everything.” It indignated me how he looked away. “Every time you do… that— I don’t know what it is, but people act differently!”

 

“Sometimes I feared—” he started then, sitting back down on the same chair as before, “I feared, but now I’m sure; you’re too sentimental for this type of life.”

 

“How could I not care?!” I slammed a fist on the table. “You  _ broke _ her!”

 

I wasn’t prepared to what Laica said next — I wasn’t prepared in the slightest. More than the message itself I wasn’t prepared for that tint of actual, genuine sorrow, concealed so carefully in the back of his voice as he spoke. I would never have thought of him as anything but horrible and that’s why these moments disarmed me, that’s why they made me so conflicted.

 

“I didn’t expect you to feel like this” came from him quietly. “I thought you’d be happy.”

 

“Why…?” I bordered on despairing, staggered back in the dim, flickering light. 

 

“Koku and her loved each other, right?” He said in a matter-of-fact, nonchalant way. “Now she doesn’t remember loving him, it’s over for them. He’ll stop feeling that for the wrong person.”

 

I couldn’t hold back the scream, a culmination of everything I hadn’t dared to say up until then.

 

“That’s not how love works, Minatsuki!”

 

“Don’t call me that.”

 

“Why not? It’s  _ your _ name!”

 

I jumped forth to grab him by the collar of his shirt in exasperation but he avoided me swiftly enough. That was the moment I started thinking that I really,  _ really _ should have tried to grow out of my crybaby tendencies because I was already choking on angry tears. Not only from Laica’s apathy that so brazenly tried to be in  _ my _ interest in ways I couldn’t even begin to comprehend, but also thinking back to how Yuna did nothing after that day’s afternoon but coldly furrow her brows at me like I was crazy when I mentioned Koku. He was a murderer, she had said, he had killed her friends. She had tense shoulders and dead eyes behind the cascade of strawberry locks. Her condition made me anguish more than what she talked about. 

 

I looked up at Laica again, and it was one of those moments when his expression shifted into a mixture of proud and condescending, when he was about to talk down to someone. He didn’t look remorseful — but by that time it started clicking that he probably had no clue he should have been. I was still hunched over, right in front of him while a bug kept repeatedly bumping against the lightbulb with a buzz, interrupting the silence. 

 

“Everything you love about a person,” Laica said, leaning closer to me, “is comprised of your memories of them. You can’t feel anything if you don’t remember.”

 

My teeth gritted unintentionally because I hated how much it made sense and how crude and cold it was as an explanation. 

 

“You say that because you never loved anyone” I burst out. His eyes narrowed before he sighed.

 

“What do you know, Izanami?”

 

“You screw up people’s heads.” I felt the saltiness of a tear reaching the corner of my mouth as I gestured by tapping my temple with my index. 

 

Laica had begun to look impatient and left himself a few seconds to think before he tapped my shoulder, walking away, like a parent getting tired of their child’s tantrum. He didn’t even turn around to add the next sentence when he crossed the kitchen’s door.

 

“You’ll have to get used to it.”

 

And, no matter how despondent I must have seemed then, eyes red and puffy and wet, no matter how dismissed I felt, I  _ did _ get used to it. In the next months I spent barely talking to anyone, the increasingly awkward meals that put me on edge because I had to see Yuna  _ like that _ , the lack of news about Koku.

 

I felt like she could have killed me when we sparred. Several weeks later, right before the storms had ceased and we’d been preparing to move, Regulus took us out training one last time. The garden was so worn-down its earlier state could have been considered well-kempt comparing to this; several trees had met miserable ends, the vegetation was reduced and half-rotten from all the water and barely anything remained from the little grass that had been there before. The latter was an additional factor of displeasure as Yuna tripped and threw me repeatedly and my back fell on the bare ground. 

 

She looked like a killing machine — just as before — but a billion times more ruthless. Her feelings always transpired from how she fought and what now emanated from her was rippling anger under a layer of numbness and self-containment. She threw punches that could have broken my bones; towards my stomach, my face and sometimes my legs, and I was on the defensive because there was a side to me that still didn’t want to fight her. I knew Yuna  _ wasn’t aware _ as she landed me in the dust and pounced me with a leg on each side. I barely fought back because I  _ knew _ . But she was strong and she was the girl who didn’t get rejected by Koku — it was logical, after all, that I would be the one getting hurt. 

 

“Excellent work! Keep it up!” I heard Regulus encourage her from the sidelines. 

 

I only noticed then that our match had gone so far in terms of Yuna’s performance that the three others were all staring at us. In the corner of my eye Laica was busy plastering up a bruise on his leg, still glancing our way occasionally, while Minatsuki stood with his hands on his hips to assist to the show. I got hit in the lung again and tried to desperately fend off Yuna in my coughing fit. Miraculously, I stood up and avoided a kick, staggering nonetheless and beginning to get tired. She was incredibly quick and precise, I was parrying so much I could already mentally see the dark purple marks on my arms and thighs. 

 

The next time I fell I knew I didn’t have the energy to get up again. I was panting and sweating, not only from exhaustion but also from panic; I started to lose track. How long was Regulus going to keep this up? Yuna wasn’t going to stop, not after the brainwashing. I tried looking into his eyes and only did so for a fraction of a second, being confronted with a complete tranquility that chilled me to the bone. Suddenly, I was overcome with fear.

 

Regulus was letting me die. He would have. 

 

I didn’t have the time to contemplate the cruelty of the situation, nor the voice to scream or ask for help. In mere moments, Yuna was above me again with her falling-apart ponytail and murderous eyes, ready to land another punch to my face as the thin fingers of her other hand wrapped around my throat. I was resorting to my last moves in order to escape — I rolled onto my side like a chased animal and desperately tried to crawl away on the ground, covering all my clothes in dirt. She was trying to hold me back so hard, both by the neck and by the waist, that her nails were leaving red marks on my skin. At that point I was doing nothing but frantically trying to protect my life and escape in any way possible so I wasn’t in my right mind when  _ it happened _ .

 

My eyes remained shut. The first thing I could state to myself was that I didn’t die — didn’t even get hit. I was frozen in the same position, body half-twisted between lying on my belly and my back, limbs contracted in front of me as protection, but Yuna wasn’t gripping me anymore. 

 

I looked again and let the scene play out without daring to move for a while from pure shock. In the foreground of my visual was a neatly-shaped dark blade, about the length of my lower leg from knee to ankle — the same portion it was replacing — reflecting the faint sunlight in limpid edges. It was confusing and almost hypnotizing as an object, as though something beyond perception had been radiating from it, which is why it distracted me so much I barely paid attention to Yuna sitting on the ground a few meters from me, wide-eyed. Her hands were covered in a frightening amount of blood as her gaze froze on them. I saw Regulus, Minatsuki and Laica approaching with quick steps, the latter bringing along the medical supplies he’d been using with what presented as a formal sense of obligation. When he bandaged Yuna up, I still hadn’t reassessed myself, despite it taking pretty long — it was a deep cut across the middle of both arms, deep enough that it would scar. 

 

“This wasn’t expected, but what an amazing result!” Regulus snapped me out of it by kneeling down beside me; I started feeling a little stupid, panting like that with one leg lifted. 

 

That, the moment when his fingers ghosted along the blade which I would find out was called  _ lohengrin _ later, was when I became an asset. It might sound cold that this was what ultimately made me feel like I had a personal worth, but such was the world we lived in. When I packed up my few belongings, I thought of Koku again, with something closer to happiness than any emotion I’d felt lately but that I could have more accurately defined as resolve. The prospect of returning to him wasn’t so absurd anymore. I wanted to protect him. And I would have — now I had a tool for it as well.

 

From that day onwards I would step on my left with a little bit more vigilance and Yuna would always wear long gloves.


	7. 7.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Sarcastic reverse psychology voice* There is no way in hell I'm venting 23910329 personal problems in this fic and this specific chapter that I have no other way of expressing because people would wonder what the fuck is wrong with me. That's just impossible.
> 
> This is a Distinctly minatsukicest chapter. I'm kinda dropping the pretense that I don't feel like writing about them 24/7. Also it's past 4am and I'm gonna have a migraine throughout tomorrow.

I usually thought of life as too unfair to be able to believe in karma. There were, however, a few instances that were so ironic in their nature that my first thought was attributing them to a similar cosmic force. I spent a long time wondering if one person was allowed to go too far with unacceptable actions without any retribution, if it was possible that someone out there wouldn’t be stopped by anything in the world — but the events made it so I still don’t know. Because this time retribution came, and it came hard.

 

It started on an afternoon, at the time when we were already in the underground gym of a military building in the outer industrial areas of central Cremona. Uglier, admittedly, than the earlier location, but less eerie for sure. Among the walls that they hadn’t even bothered to plaster, grey and smelling of concrete, the leather punching bags, the wall bars and the container for practice weapons, three children of roughly twelve were sat. The first one was a girl with a long braid and a frail appearance, looking barely alive; the second was a boy with wavy bangs in his eyes, covering both their heterochromia and the dark circles under them — the third one was me. We tensed up when the door opened with a creak, the boy twice as much as the other two of us. The drama that would follow was already hanging in the air.

 

“Where’s Minatsuki?” Were Regulus’s completely predictable first words. 

 

No answer.

 

“Laica?” 

 

Sometimes I wondered if Yuna knew the reason he was always the one being asked about this. I wondered why  _ I _ knew, and it always took a few seconds for it to click. The story of our interpersonal relationships was harder to follow than a soap opera and uglier than a horror movie.

 

“I don’t know. He said he had something to do.” Laica blabbered, tensing up his shoulders, which was something he had only been doing recently. “Hours ago” he added.

 

“Late again” Regulus murmured to himself. “I’m gonna kill that brat one of these days.”

 

I was lucky not to precisely know about the unfortunate references that phrase made when he was the one saying it. He tapped his foot and looked at his watch, following a rule we had established a while ago of waiting five minutes for Minatsuki or the training would begin without him and he would have twice as much work to do. And Minatsuki eventually made it within the time window, but always at the last moment like a diva. It must have angered Regulus a great deal that it was always precisely four minutes and thirty seconds, I was positive that the boy had been counting them. As always, he burst inside, acting like he had been hurrying while it was evident that he hadn’t. His mouth was curling downwards with smugness but I knew he wanted to smile.

 

“I can do it too” he declared, subtly dramatic in a calculated way, without specifying anything.

 

“Whatever it is you mean,” Regulus raised a brow, “I assume it’s not  _ being on time _ .”

 

Minatsuki disregarded him. Instead, he made us assist to something that by then shouldn’t have been this shocking, and yet it was. He raised his left hand, just a few angles to feign casualness as if he wasn’t showing off, then it fluidly morphed into a straight, golden blade. 

 

Maybe it was also something about the way he presented it, and to some it had to be the knowledge that a reggie  _ shouldn’t have _ , but it floored everyone in the room. There was so much stillness I could practically hear the others blink. I’m sure I’d never seen Regulus so surprised before  _ or _ after that moment, his face with narrow pupils and contracted nostrils burned into my mind for how odd it was. 

 

“It’s gold on purpose,” Minatsuki blurted out because he probably found the silence awkward, “because I thought it looked cool.”

 

“Gold is pretty soft though” Laica interjected quietly, with something indecipherable in his voice and a lack of tact towards how it wasn’t the time to flaunt his knowledge on precious metals.

 

“It’s just the coating, you know” the other shrugged, reshaping his hand.

 

Regulus stood up then; he looked a little possessed, interrupting the conversation by walking up to Minatsuki and grabbing his bony wrist.

 

“How did you do that? Do it again.” 

 

He was examining him like he was some experimental model and there was an outcome to be replicated for scientific accuracy. I knew by then how quick Minatsuki was to drop the cockiness, though the speed with which he regained it afterwards makes me more inclined to say he was  _ temperamental _ . Didn’t make a difference in how frightened he could look when he messed up and Regulus reprimanded him, but he was a cat knocking objects over, growing devoid of penitence in ten seconds then repeating the cycle. His eyes widened as he was approached and he replicated the powers seen earlier, almost stabbing the other in the face. All of us would have celebrated if he had, but Regulus’s influence was an upper bound to our courage, even Minatsuki’s. 

 

“You’re an exceptional case” he murmured into his own reflection tinted gold. 

 

As praise it wasn’t humanizing in the slightest; it was like complimenting a pretty object. But it didn’t fail to make the penetrating blue of Minatsuki’s eyes glimmer and it truly made me think about how bad, how utterly bad the situation had to be with someone who rejoiced in that. 

 

Turned out, in the course of the next weeks, that Minatsuki wasn’t just good at restructuring his hand into weaponry with mystical powers. It’s as if a latch on his mind had fallen off at the time, whatever the reason was — he ran quick, he had good reflexes, he learned lexical information at an impressive rate, he was charismatic and proud of himself, always had something witty to say. Maybe the most stunning part was the effortlessness, or how well he feigned it. In those times Minatsuki had become the centre of our focus with whatever he did, and the more Regulus praised him, the better he eventually got at everything.

 

I have to admit it to myself, too — I didn’t pay attention to anything except him for a while. It was difficult to. As he was the only one among four kids who dared to be outgoing at least to an extent, I found myself somewhat drawn to him. We would sit on the harsh edge of the steps in the building’s emergency staircase and he would talk in length about philosophical subjects with a superficial, twelve-year-old understanding, mispronouncing every other word. I never corrected him because I preferred listening. 

 

“You understand what I’m talking about, Izanami?” He usually finished his discourses like that, while a few long, light hairs tangled in his mouth’s corner from fervor. 

 

“I hope so” I smiled and nodded. It was genuine, because his presence was refreshing comparing to Regulus’s continuous torments. 

 

“So this is all pretty great.” It was the end comment to some outlandish and probably outdated theory about the universe, thrown there on the spot, but it still amazed me how good he was at disregarding our miserable living conditions.

 

“I think you must be smart to be thinking about this,” I said, staring at the patterns of mold on the wall in front of us, “I’m probably not this smart.”

 

“But you’re listening, right?” He shrugged, and the light played a bit differently on his long, shiny hair every time he did this and it fell off his shoulders. 

 

“Regulus talks well about you all the time.” It was one of those moments when I didn’t think before speaking. 

 

I could see a hint of Minatsuki tensing up, perhaps it was his well-masked version of a heart skipping a beat. 

 

“Doesn’t matter what he says.” His voice was lower and I was filled with intense regret for bringing up the subject until he followed up; “He’s just a nasty old man. He can go screw himself.”

 

“Would you say that to his face, also?” My lips were curling up at my own joke.

 

“Watch me do it” he smiled back.

 

“Wait, Minatsuki, no—” I panicked when he actually hopped up from the stairs. “I wasn’t serious. Please don’t.”

 

“Too late!”

 

Because this is Minatsuki we’re talking about, he  _ did _ do it. In the most unwarranted and rude way, in the middle of a dinner when he could be sure Regulus was listening closely and Yuna and Laica were also witnessing. The target of the insult was on the verge of spitting out the piece of cutlet in his mouth, which demonstrated a formidable talent of Minatsuki’s in angering the most stoic of people — but it didn’t prevent him from spending the rest of the evening and a good portion of the night stranded in a corner. The other two watched on with their usual silent passiveness when Regulus delivered him the slap that would leave a red mark throughout the next day. I, too, did nothing, then felt guilty for it; more guilty at least than Yuna, who was barely socially present, and Laica with his consistent lack of consideration.

 

Retrospectively, I  _ should have _ spared a thought to the rest of my surroundings. Even disregarding my need to pile regrets onto myself, to think about everything I could have prevented, not noticing the tension subtly evolving in the background now feels like simple stupidity. I was probably right when I told Minatsuki I wasn’t as intelligent as him. And so, as it would often happen, I had to be confronted with the chaotic reality all at once.

 

I couldn’t help but feel like I was living in a piece of classical literature when life decided to play parallelisms on me. Fate was looking down on all of us, mocking, when that day came, around a month after the discovery of Minatsuki’s power in that underground gym. Same setting. Same atmosphere. Three children — but this time it was me, the apathetic girl with the braid and a blonde boy rocking back and forth with his legs crossed. The deja-vu brought me a sudden migraine when Regulus stepped in and said, as if it had been scripted;

 

“Where’s Min—” The play interrupted. He bit his lip. “Laica. Where’s Laica?”

 

A few seconds of expected quiet; he stared at Minatsuki, who flailed his hands furiously before himself with widened eyes to gesticulate how he didn’t know. But, of course, the routine had to diverge this time. The policies were different with Laica. They had been from the start.

 

“Go look for him, Izanami.”

 

As I rushed out the door and up the stairs, I was trying to decipher why Regulus had sent me. It was obvious who the logical choice would have been, someone both — officially — closer to Laica, and who could have gotten this done quickly with better jogging speed.  _ Logical choice _ ; it was, to me, at the time. Because I hadn’t been paying attention. Regulus, on the other hand, was an adult and a very cunning and observant one at that.

 

I didn’t expect to find him in the first place I looked — his room. I hadn’t been inside there before so my eyes had to dart around quite a bit when I entered. We had been interspersed in sober military bedrooms at that time, with narrow windows and dirty bunk beds. The one Laica resided in gave off, in addition, the impression of a hoarder’s haven. There were too many objects stuffed everywhere, despite how meticulously they were arranged; books, sheets of paper, prints and a variety of notes that had been stuck on the wall above the desk for lack of space, occupying almost all of it. I couldn’t help but stare at the boy himself, too, when I saw him hunched over the aforementioned desk. I was dangerously close to feeling bad for him again, for how he never spoke and those circles under his eyes. He jolted up when I opened the door, this time much quicker than when I first visited him in his containment at Jaula Blanca.

 

“What is it?” In tone, he was just as crude as back then.

 

“Training.”

 

“Tell him I don’t feel like going.”

 

“You can’t just—” I flinched as he raised his eyebrows. “You know the rules.”

 

“Izanami,” he stood up then, gaze fixed on the doorframe next to me like he was  _ forcing himself _ , “just tell him.”

 

I almost yelped because I hadn’t noticed at all that tremble in his voice and the twitches of his face. It was bordering on a tic, as though an insurmountable avalanche of  _ something _ — most likely anger — was about to erupt from him. I was once again caught up in a fight-or-flight response that made me resort to the worst strategy: freezing in place. 

 

“Is there… something wrong?” I was about to append his name to the question, but I was unsure which one to use when it was just the two of us.

 

“Come on, why don’t you go?” He said with a venomous underlying spite. “Nobody will notice I’m not there.”

 

“Regulus noticed. That’s why he sent me.” My impatience urged me to argue, which had been a terrible, terrible decision. His phrase hadn’t even been meant literally. 

 

“So he’s not busy looking at Minatsuki’s hand for the billionth time now?”

 

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Laica was boiling. Seething. It was natural that anyone would have been envious of Minatsuki — he was a brilliant and interesting kid, an antithesis of what he should have been after the things he had gone through. I felt somewhat like that towards him as well. But this was an envy that could have burned down forests, slaughtered villages, taken down everything in its way like a wave of misery and destruction. It made me especially uncomfortable knowing such a disastrous inner force came together with brainwashing powers. I could have put the pieces together a bit sooner — that Laica had been in cahoots with Regulus before, coaxed with blatant favouritism, and now we were at the awkward stage where half of us could summon lohengrin and he wasn’t among them.

 

“He’ll punish you if you don’t come down” I looked for the easiest way out. “You know he’s terrible when he does that.”

 

“No, he won’t.” It was a bluff, I could hear it from the hesitation. He wouldn’t have tried to find out. He wasn’t Minatsuki; well, not  _ that one _ at least. 

 

“Laica, plea—” I stepped closer to where he was standing by the desk, feeling like a bullfighter.

 

“You don’t get it, Izanami.” He was as close to shouting as he usually could get. Now he was coming towards me and I was retreating, almost past the entrance. 

 

“I do. Whatever. I want.”

 

That little fight between us — our only remaining way of talking to each other as of late — ended up remaining behind closed doors. Laica showed up eventually and Regulus didn’t mention anything, but only because he knew the annoyed expression on his face would be enough to make the boy do his laps with a hint of shame in every step. I knew he didn’t have the ability to dissipate all the rage he had shown me; it only got pushed further and further back in his mind. I, of all people, knew it was still there. 

 

It was a changing point. Besides the fact that Laica and Minatsuki had ceased to talk to each other, something that had been the case for a while then despite it going under my radar, I came to the realization in only a few days that I wasn’t seeing Laica around all that often. He was present at Regulus’s social activities (or rather, attempts at making our life hell and turn us into soldiers), but he was nowhere to be found during the breaks. I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t keep an eye on him. I often found myself walking around the military facility, the distastefully badly-maintained corridors, the unused offices smelling of rot, specifically to look for him. Some of the numerous moments when background information was simply unavailable to me.

 

Then, an evening came when I had to peek outside the door of my room from the noises and tapping of feet outside, and two minutes later we were already gathered in the plain, dusty courtyard, a practically empty area delineated by a wire fence. The night breeze and an owl hooting in the distance seemed like feeble attempts at waking up Yuna, Minatsuki and I from our disorientation, all of us with ruffled hair and pajamas. It was picturesque in a sense. Regulus looked like Mother Mary lifting up the lifeless body of Jesus before he splashed water over Laica’s face from the plastic bottle in his hand.

 

“Are you stupid?” He was yelling, and yes, it was one of the few times when somebody had made him lose it. “Are you a complete moron?!”

 

Laica was only coming back to his conscience then, looking just as awkward in this situation as the rest of us. He had training gear on him, covered in sweat and dirt in every spot where it wasn’t the water that had been poured on him. He was still out of it, blinking slowly, and for a moment Regulus’s hand over his shoulder made a twitch like he wanted to strangle him. I saw Minatsuki paling next to me and I saw Yuna not caring at all.

 

“You go exercise when you want,” Regulus continued shouting in his face, out of character, “I don’t care, but see if I bother picking you up next time you pass out!”

 

I almost had it in me to step in and at least attempt to make him aware he had lost his composure. It still sent my stomach into knots to see Laica being treated like that directly after fainting, I suppose out of human decency despite disliking the things he had done. The story, on a different note, came together from what Minatsuki told me entire days later; Laica was, apparently on a quest of spending all his free time training, an activity where he sometimes failed to take into account his own physical limitations as a child of twelve who had spent his first ten years in isolation. The result was this — overexertion. It was an attempt at being tragically ascetic that brought a chuckle of sarcasm out of me, especially since I knew precisely what had warranted it. Despite informing me, Minatsuki seemed painfully oblivious about the motivations. In fact, he was the one who displayed the most confusion while he watched Laica finally twitch back to life as Regulus proceeded with his reprimands.

 

“Don’t you  _ dare _ die on me! Do you understand? Do you understand?” The phrase could have been a giveaway about a great number of things, but luckily for him, we all dismissed it. 

 

Our curfew was postponed on that evening. Laica was bitterly escorted back to his room by Regulus and the rest of us disappeared without a single comment on the events. I lied awake in my bed, realizing I wasn’t able to sleep, as every time I had too many things to ruminate on. I got tired of staring at the gaps between the upper bunk’s slats eventually and decided that checking up on Laica could have been a reasonable thing to do. He  _ did _ pass out and some instinctual worry awakened in me that allowed me to put my grudges with him aside. His door was, this time, open enough that I was perfectly visible standing in it, though nobody — among the two people inside — noticed me. I felt a nauseating sense of repetition and started wondering how much of my life I would have spent overhearing conversations.

 

“Well, did I ask you to?”

 

“You didn’t ask me  _ not to _ .”

 

“Don’t you have anything else to do?”

 

Laica was sat on his bed with a towel on his head, ultimately not putting too much effort into drying his hair. He looked like he was trying to be standoffish while being really, really exhausted. 

 

“I don’t know what’s your problem with me.” Minatsuki was losing his temper and social tact.

 

“You’re the one who has a problem,” Laica said quietly with that childishly bitter undertone, “if you’re lowering yourself to the level of losers from your mighty heights.”

 

“What on earth are you talking about?!”

 

It seemed like, just like when I last talked to him, there were a few specific buttons to push for Laica’s patience to reach its limit. He rose from where he was sat abruptly, one dam for his anger crumbling after the other. Minatsuki, in the other side of the room with his disarrayed hair and pajama shorts that showed off his skinny legs in a somewhat comical way, flinched.

 

“I’m talking about how you shouldn’t have come running here just to show off how great you are.” Laica raised his voice, to perhaps the same extent as the last time I assisted to their bickering accidentally, but the aggravation behind it was different. “Like you always do,” he blabbered on in a way he never did, “you make a spectacle for everyone.”

 

“Well,  _ excuse me _ if I did a bunch of things so you would talk to me!” Minatsuki yelled back at him and Laica’s eyes went impossibly wide. “But of course you’re never impressed, nothing is ever good enough for you!”

 

That put a long, long silence between them. In a few seconds, I speculated, Minatsuki would probably regret disclosing all of that so impulsively. He was looking away with a face uncharacteristically awkward, and Laica was a statue, because reformulating the little narrative of self-commiseration he had built around the two of them was a bit difficult after it crumbled. His voice was controlled again when it broke the tension, almost too quiet for me to hear.

 

“It’s fine.” He stepped to Minatsuki with an uncertainty that was ridiculous if I thought back to them at the beginning. “I’m impressed. You don’t need to do more.”

 

I was realizing something terrible as Laica reached out to stroke the platinum blonde locks at the side of his face — that they were the movements of someone caressing a pet and that his voice would always,  _ always _ have something manipulative about it, even if he wasn’t completely at ease, like sweet poison dripping from his lips even when he didn’t intend it to. More horrifyingly, the other thing I realized was that Minatsuki was mush, he was absolutely sold on it; if Laica told him to halt his progresses and step to the side on his path to let him pass, he would have done it. And it wasn’t the King’s eye or anything supernatural — it was something else I didn’t want to acknowledge.

 

I stepped away from the door as swiftly and silently as I could, knowing I would now have an even worse sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Ok tbh partly inspired by *that specific flashback part* of Strange encounter by Bananas45 because afterwards I kept overthinking it, then I realized Minatsuki could actually do limb blades and Laica couldn't, judging from the fight in the last episode, and holy fucking shit I wonder how he felt about that the whole time. But also it's tragically funny in a way.)


	8. 8.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, I'm very busy and still not in the best of moods. I was really intent on making Kamui show up and wasn't sure how, but then I guess I figured a way — though the narrative of this chapter was supposed to be longer (yeah, even longer than the fucking 5k I wrote) so the second part of it will be in the next one. 
> 
> As expected of Kamui-related things, this needs a few warnings I guess (I'm also gonna have to retag) among which: Kamui drinking, swearing and saying a lot of inappropriate things, mentions of gore and also him not stopping Izanami from consuming alcohol at 14. It's like one sip of beer, but I've been notified before to tag this stuff (for some reason?) so better be safe.

I concentrated all the care I had into the minute movements of my hand and pushed the ringhandles together. Two pieces of metal met with a click and a series of pink chops fell in succession like dominos, bright against the front and shoulders of the black dress. There was a flinch and I stopped, cautious and startled.

 

“Don’t squirm around like that,” I said with a bit of playfulness, “or I’ll get them uneven.”

 

Yuna remained silent but stiller than before. Her eyes were lazily fixated on my face, I assumed she was looking at the marks on it, something that I knew made people stare at me odd. I tried not to feel happy that she took interest in something. I made a note that I should gather up the cut-off pieces of hair, now all over her clothing and the bedcover underneath us. It never failed to puzzle me how decent, clean and modern these rooms were comparing to what I’d gotten used to in the past few years — I even developed an urge to maintain them out of my own will, as if they were an incredible treasure or reward, thus I ended up doing chores eagerly during those times. 

 

The job was done in a few minutes and I contemplated Yuna for a while, a little proud of myself for how well her freshly-made bangs aligned on her forehead. It was better than before, much better than her hair constantly ending up in her face in tangles, making her look like a sort of amazon on the brink of human civilization. She was simply too apathetic to take care of herself before I spent all that time convincing her not to be; despite looking so naturally pretty she gave no thought to fashion early on — we were around fourteen — which resulted in her outfits being thrown-together and tomboyish. Though it was understandable in our life situation, it disheartened me a bit because I was sure she used to care more about her looks before she was— No, I shook my head every time those musings came on, I should have stopped thinking about things that could have been. 

 

I stood up from the bed, taking a last look at the latest results of my attempts at prettying her up, which included what she was currently wearing. I felt no fault doing it; she was, after all, the closest one could get to a doll whenever she wasn’t mechanically assassinating people, something Regulus had started to make us engage in recently. Yuna was a stunning robot who always gave the same answers to the same questions. The only topic that could elicit emotion out of her was her conviction that Koku was responsible for the Jaula Blanca massacre, something she held up as stubbornly as only a brainwashed person could have. Otherwise she did nothing particular, nothing distinct — even her room looked like nobody was living in it if one overlooked the remainders of hair, every detail and crease of the sheets measured out as if someone had arranged the scene and placed this barely sentient being in it. Someone  _ had _ , in a way.

 

An hour earlier Laica had come up to me in the community area of the hotel floor we were occupying, with the same stealth as usual, and placed a pair of scissors in my palm. Surgical ones nonetheless; Regulus’s, I presumed. 

 

“Her bangs need trimming. She won’t do it on her own.”

 

“Why me?” I looked up from the novel I was reading. 

 

“It seemed like something you would do.”

 

I tried to ignore the uncomfortable bout of nostalgia and removed the book from against my knees, slipping a scrap of paper in it as a mark. I used to spend a lot of time like that, curled up on an armchair that had been placed next to the coffee table, trying to remove myself from reality by reading. I consumed a concerning amount of romance stories and sometimes imagined Koku and myself as the characters, fantasies that I knew I wouldn’t work towards bringing closer to reality anytime soon. I thought about how I would escape Regulus’s group from time to time, but knowing the power he had I didn’t dare to — or rather, oddly enough, Laica concerned me far more despite technically not being the one issuing instructions and coordinating reggies all over the country. Regulus was a human with too many strings in his hand but a human nonetheless; Laica was something else. This was perhaps why I never really put up a fight with him and didn’t criticize his actions either after our last argument. 

 

It was logical to ask me, too, because I had developed a taste for makeup and clothing in recent times. In the first instance we had been let out for a few hours in the city with a very limited amount of pocket money I ended up impulse-buying a set of colorful face paint, the idea of masquerading in an artistic way just seemed oddly attractive to me. It was of a terrible quality given that the four of us were wandering around shops in a poorer district of Central Cremona on that day, but both owning a personal item and being able to express my creativity made me giddy as concepts. When we returned at the hotel, Regulus was confronted with a group of teenagers, three of which with new weaponry and the fourth with a small plastic bag full of little pigment cans of all colours, which he shook his head at patronizingly but never really held against me. Every day was spent with new experiments on how eccentric I could make myself look and I quickly earned a reputation of fashion expert despite how bizarre some of the arrangements turned out. It was another pastime to distract myself besides the novels — which I often would impertinently steal from shops given that my budget wasn’t too abundant. 

 

Maybe I was also in the need for a change in appearance, to keep up with the others in a way. It could have been the ruthless work we had to do or the stress we underwent, but puberty hit the other three hard, earlier than one would have expected. Minatsuki, with hair that now reached his waist, had grown incredibly tall and skinny, losing any trace of childish softness in his features. Laica was entirely unrecognizable from the muscle the insistent, relentless physical training earned him besides a strain on his face that made him pass for at least five years older than he was. Yuna had the same delicacy as before but now looked more like a woman than a little girl. I was the only one who hadn’t changed much; I suspected it could have been connected to my genes but I felt somewhat indignated and infantile compared to them so I climbed out of my cocoon like a butterfly of odd hue contrasts and clothing pieces that made people on the street look twice. 

 

It was Regulus’s mistake to treat us like adults, because we eventually started acting like we were. The freedom to move around at least in our temporary habitation felt almost inconceivable at first, a sense of responsibility that we didn’t know what to do with — we did the work we had to do with dedication, taking out targets and transporting drugs back and forth, but when we came home we looked bored and soulless. There was a small common balcony with the most gorgeous view on the city where I would often find Laica on his own; I presumed because staring in the distance just didn’t get old to him as an activity to a surprising extent. For a while I only observed without talking to him, looked at his hands as he flicked the cap of the cigarette box repeatedly and exhaled the smoke. I had to wonder if he had stolen them or Regulus had willingly given a fourteen-year-old kid tobacco (which wasn’t beyond him) but Laica taking on these habits filled me with a strange disgust. It was the wrong direction to be headed.

 

“I ask myself sometimes why we’re doing all of this” I managed to speak one day while standing there.

 

Laica shrugged as a dangerous indicator of his unwillingness to give me a clear answer, even if he could have, while taking another drag of the cigarette. He was still wearing a protection vest over the long-sleeved shirt from whatever duty he’d taken care of earlier, hair half-gathered in a small ponytail. Meanwhile the late afternoon lights were making Central Cremona warm and sluggish as they reflected from faraway skyscrapers.

 

“Isn’t Regulus trying to do something?” I insisted. “Like there’s something big underneath all these jobs.”

 

“He doesn’t tell me everything, you know” came the reply, finally. He still didn’t look my way.

 

I felt like there was no point in not disclosing my thoughts about the topic to him, so I blurted out whatever I had on my mind at the moment.

 

“I know you’re grateful he picked us up and that it’s dangerous to leave now and all, but  _ Laica _ , he could sacrifice us. He— he’d do it. If we’re going to get killed, there’s no point in staying here.”

 

“Don’t worry,” he said calmly, after a pause, “I can guarantee he won’t. Not anytime soon at least.”

 

“I really want to believe you’re right.” I leaned on the edge of the glass panel that served as a railing with my elbows. 

 

We remained like that for a while, without talking, as I had to realize that a lot of anger I had towards him had cooled down over time though it would never be completely gone. Maybe it was the fact that he looked and acted quite differently now and I was able to dissociate from when he used to throw his bossy tantrums. He was unagitated in a more mature way and not even impossible to converse with — besides which, at that point I had encountered so many criminals on the daily that even Laica’s cruelty gained some context, and that didn’t make him any better, but it reassured me he was far from the worst. I watched him finish his smoke, proceeding to distract himself by poking the butt around until the filter popped out of it.

 

“Remember when I walked into your room and you used to show me all those drawings?” I said whimsically.

 

He nodded.

 

“I’ve actually been on a plane yesterday.”

 

“How was it?” He turned his face towards me just a little as it showed just the smallest furrow of amusement. “Underwhelming, I bet.”

 

“It was— alright, I suppose. Not too good, not too bad.”

 

“Underwhelming, then. This is a disappointing world.”

 

“A vicious one, also” I murmured in agreement as he waved a brief goodbye and walked back in. 

 

It could have been a few days after this that Regulus summoned us in the lobby downstairs, waiting for everyone to pay close attention to him in the small area surrounded by several puffy sofas made of the same fabric — I was sinking into one with my legs up on the armrest, an arguably rude thing to do in a public place, but since I’d had my blade I could get away with these things. At the other side of the circle was Yuna, cold-looking as ever, while Laica and Minatsuki were sitting on two ends of the same sofa to my right. Regulus glared strictly at the latter for twirling a front strand around his index out of boredom.

 

“I told you to tie your hair back.”

 

“Whatever, I can work like this.” It was true; Minatsuki rarely made any mistakes.

 

I was already waiting for an argument to erupt, but instead I saw Laica patiently pulling out a hair tie — seemingly out of nowhere — and reaching for the cascade of platinum blonde on the back of Minatsuki, who groaned with annoyance but let him. It was hard to place these acts where he didn’t ask for either permission or orders; I kept wondering if he was desperate to make a good impression on Regulus, didn’t want the other two to fight or was actually concerned about the hair-topic. A remainder of the times when he was watching out for every move Minatsuki made, perhaps.

 

“What are we waiting for?” I interjected just so the issue would be over with.

 

“Certain people” Regulus replied with his eyes focused on the hotel’s front door. 

 

They eventually arrived; a group of reggies dressed unsuitably for the circumstances and various government agents whose hand Regulus shook when he went up to them, discussing matters none of us could hear from where we were sat. He then came back with his arm around one person who shivered and looked sort of disgusted by the contact as the others left. A boy who looked slightly older than us.

 

“You’ll be working with him on this project, about a week or so” Regulus announced while patting the kid’s shoulder, “it will be a trial for him so try to be professional. Alright?”

 

Laica was the only one among us who nodded — the rest stared with suspicion. The newcomer scratched the stubbly black hair on his nape with a mixture of embarrassment and irritation. He looked more average than any of us, masculine facial traits in the phase of development and pimples across his forehead and cheek typical of teenagers. Regulus had his gaze pinned on him with a subtle expectance, I could tell he wanted him to introduce himself. 

 

“Bunch of kids, are you?” The boy resorted to saying as he flopped on one of the unoccupied sofas.

 

That was the first sentence Kamui had directed towards us.

 

The job itself wasn’t anything difficult — we just had to supervise the tradings that went down in a specific gathering location during a certain period of the evening, hours in which we didn’t even really talk to each other as we were interspersed in different corners of an underground bar full of reggies. It was  _ working with Kamui _ that brought on the problems. The intervals where we had to share information with each other required us to communicate, which could have already posited obstacles when we had to do it with a person we weren’t accustomed to; in this case said person’s character made things harder. We were near the entrance of the place as half the guests had already left one time, all looking at this new, assigned partner of ours, waiting for the reports.

 

“Well,” Kamui had pulled up his shoulders, “I think the guy with the funky suit mentioned drugs.”

 

“More precisely?” Minatsuki asked, chewing on a thumbnail with nervousness his voice didn’t reflect.

 

“Hell if I know, he just said drugs.”

 

“We need to know which kind, we don’t care about the rest but they can’t sell gold solution without authorization” Laica explained like he was talking to a particularly stupid child.

 

“He didn’t say more,” the other groaned, “otherwise I would’ve told you, right?”

 

“You should have listened more closely” came the retort from Minatsuki.

 

“Yeah, and who are you to tell me what I should do?” Kamui snarled back.

 

“Regulus will say the same.”

 

“Wow, look at me caring.”

 

We let it be that once, but I remember it being the first instance, and that we walked back glaring at each other repeatedly and trying to interpret a reality where someone didn’t demonstrate at least relative obedience towards our boss. It seemed absurd at the time. Kamui’s personality, too, was hard to wrap one’s brain around, especially with his unbridled temperament and how violent and dismissive he could get. It took me a while to get to know him and I wasn’t sure anyone else even did, but I do suspect my fate has always been to carefully observe every participant in the grand theatre play of my life. He wasn’t  _ stupid _ ; he did very well when he put his mind to something, reason why he must have ended up so high in the ranks in the first place. The main problem was his emotional maturity — that of an infant’s — and that it was stuck on an age below our meager one. 

 

Kamui would spend a disproportionate amount of time in the ground floor’s bar. He seemed, at the time, just old enough to drink, but that didn’t keep him from having the same attitude towards the matter as a burnt-out alcoholic. He sat on his own, went to pick drunken fights, sometimes cursed at others out of boredom; definitely not the most attractive person to approach, but I somehow did nonetheless. I was, still, very timid and scared of him, but that did seem like something that drew me to people consistently after all. 

 

“Oh, you” Kamui jolted when he saw me settle on the bar stool next to his — I probably looked silly with my small frame and unconventional clothing. 

 

“Hey” I said, barely making a sound.

 

“I don’t hit on fourteen-year-olds, so you better leave if you aren’t here to drink booze” he replied bluntly, sending an entire glass of beer down his throat in one go. 

 

“I will, then.” It was a statement I wasn’t sure why I made, perhaps as a clumsy socialization attempt.

 

“What, hit on me?”

 

“Drink.”

 

I had never had alcohol before in my life.

 

“Yo, get me another beer!” Kamui turned to the barman who quickly obliged, then placed the glass before me, which maybe some of the adults present should have paid more attention to.

 

He was challenging me, I realized. My eyes were darting all over the jug’s ridges with slight panic, debating whether I should have acted daring. Somehow I instantly thought of how Laica was already smoking and figured these vices must not have been as bad as they were made out to be. I kicked my legs a bit to release tension and took a sip of the drink. My idea of doing so turned out to be worse than expected — the unusual, bitter taste sent me coughing and spluttering, but I swallowed the beer anyway out of some divine intervention. I saw how much the scene entertained Kamui, an unintentional grin on his face that I had only seen on him out of malice before. 

 

“God, I’m not sober now, but,” he trailed off, “you’re a cool kid. I just decided. I mean, you don’t got a stick up your ass like everyone.”

 

I had to admit, I liked the compliments. Especially since I still childishly thrived on being appreciated somehow, and when it came from someone older than me it made me giddy. I thought back to all the mishaps in that one godforsaken mission location and how ruthlessly Kamui would pick apart anything the others told him; Regulus barely held him accountable afterwards (I suspected it was about the mysterious trial he mentioned) and that increased the hostility even more. I knew he hated Minatsuki’s and Laica’s guts and, a bit irrationally, Yuna’s as well. His appreciation, even in this state, felt surreal. I realized I was awkward company back then since I could sit still for too long without saying anything, a silence Kamui filled by rolling around on his stool playfully and beginning to talk again.

 

“I fucking loathe the rest of ‘em.” His voice went hoarse for a second as he was in the middle of swallowing his next drink. “I know they’re your friends, you can tattle, I don’t care.”

 

“Why, I mean…” I got discouraged before looking at Kamui and realizing he was being surprisingly attentive. “You hated them before they even talked to you.”

 

“You know, I can’t stand the idea of working with brats. I’m nineteen.”

 

My eyes sprung open in the course of a few seconds. I wouldn’t be able to tell how old I thought he was, but if I put the puzzle pieces together on how I hadn’t seen him before and he was involved with Regulus, he had to be a reggie, which meant…

 

“You look like a living heart attack, kid. Yeah, I’m on probation so they’ll see if they can get me that hormone cocktail when the time comes. I’m on the verge of just giving it up ‘cause your buddies are too insufferable.”

 

“I know they can be… Strict.” I pushed past my lips diplomatically, because although I recognized the frustration of entering this group, I still had some protectiveness towards them from being around them for long if not else. The rest of the beer remained before me, untouched.

 

“Look, first off, the fuck’s up with that chick?”

 

“Yuna?”

 

“I don’t know, she pisses me off. I hate cold bitches.”

 

I didn’t dare to either approve or disapprove. Of course, I knew it wasn’t Kamui’s fault he didn’t know half the story behind Yuna, but his comments were unwarranted nevertheless. I had way too much unnecessary tact at that age so I refrained from defending anyone’s honour and tried to make my expression resemble quiet acceptance.

 

“Speaking of which,” Kamui continued, “the other cold bitch is terrible as well.”

 

“...Minatsuki?” I tried to guess unsurely.

 

“Yeah. The girly-looking motherfucker. There’s something wrong with both of ‘em, I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. I don’t know what’s up with the quiet dude either but he bugs the hell out of me.”

 

I was confronted with the fact that Kamui, more street-smart than educated, had a frighteningly potent intuition. He’d only known us for four or five days then, and yet he understood more about us than we probably did about each other. It made me ask myself whether he could perceive any of the pressure I, too, felt on a daily basis, and if he was being lenient towards me because my relationship with Laica and the people he got me involved with always ended with me getting the short end of the stick, suffocating tears in the evening and biting my fist to stay quiet. 

 

“You know who I like the least though?— God, your pals are nothing compared to that.” Kamui glared at me hard after slamming the empty glass on the table, like he was telling me a secret.

 

“The old man” he followed up. “I’ll just tell you outright, Izanami. That son of a bitch kills people for fun. I can tell.”

 

“What makes you think that?” I asked, furrowing my brows, but it wasn’t in my intention to contradict him because, well, I figured Regulus would have a problem of the sort a long time ago — I just had never declared it so neatly.

 

“Trust me, I know.” Kamui shrugged. “As someone who  _ has  _ killed people for fun.”

 

I almost fell off the bar stool as I backed away with a shudder. My heart started beating out of my chest. It’s not that I hadn’t seen people getting slaughtered before me — I had since I was ten — but there was a big difference between functional purposes and murderous urges.

 

“Don’t shit your pants, dear god. How can you even handle the underworld…?”

 

“I’m sorry, I—” I didn’t even know why I was apologizing to a self-confessed maniacal killer. I was only put at more ease when he explained next.

 

“Well, okay, it’s not entirely true.” He paused, sighing, before getting lost in his narration. “I got picked up by local mafia after they burned that shithole down. And, yeah, fuckers had me do these public deathmatches ‘cause it was entertaining to them I wouldn’t die. I was scared shitless at first but I guess something clicked… Then I just took it as good fun. I know at least three ways to kill a person with any object you give me.”

 

I felt the sweat running down my forehead as he gesticulated enthusiastically, holding up three fingers, and perhaps what terrified me was that he still looked like a child bragging about his accomplishments. There was an underlying mad infantilism to Kamui’s behaviour; he looked only half-aware of the things he did (the slaughtering specifically, which I would only witness later) and I couldn’t tell how excusable that should have made him. Maybe it was the way he was raised, maybe his being a reggie. The combination of the two was destined to be catastrophic for sure.

 

“What’s exciting about murder?” I gathered the courage to ask.

 

“Eh, I’m not sure” Kamui scratched his chin, slumping down a bit from drunken tiredness. “You see how much damage you can do and all the different ways. You can get creative with fucking someone up, I guess I’d call it art.”

 

It would have seemed absurd that he and I, of all people, would end up having a bonding period. It only lasted those few days but I can say for sure that I hadn’t felt so lighthearted in entire years. Bizarre and likely concerning that someone like Kamui would have brought out my fun side, but it was his way of taking the most gruesome things easily that helped me cope with my situation better. We did small talk in free moments and discussed morbid subjects in a joking way — retrospectively it made me feel cooler and more adult — and he also seemed happy to hang out with someone he didn’t dislike. I saw Laica staring at our duo with confusion sometimes, but considering my usual anxiety was his fault I really didn’t care about his opinion. 

 

“I’m running off here,” Kamui said once as he entered my room without warning, “s’posed to be on a job with Barbie but I don’t feel like it.”

 

I was sprawled on my bed, lying on my stomach and reading the umpteenth romance novel, which I interrupted to look up at him. We had a bit of a halfhearted chat while he walked around, examining my personal belongings one by one and even picking them up without asking. It bothered me, but not enough to tell him not to. He was flipping through my books, a bit puzzled and amused, then his gaze fell on my cans of paint.

 

“Is that what you do the thing on your face with?” He pointed to the corner of his own mouth to reference the small pair of lips I usually drew there.

 

“They’re pigments… Yeah” I sat up.

 

“Freaky…”

 

Kamui looked lost in thought for a second, as though he’d been pondering on some brilliant and complex idea. He turned around again and spoke, then, with the container for dark blue in his hand.

 

“You think I could use these?”

 

“Sure, what for though?”

 

“I like those marks you make with them, they look artsy. I want some too.”

 

Disregarding how differently we thought about what ‘artsy’ meant normally, I was suddenly filled with a pleasant warmth; nobody had said they even liked my style before despite my reputation. As trivial a thing as it was, I was exuberantly happy on that afternoon and we spent the rest of it trying to get Kamui’s makeup right. The two of us stood before the mirror in the bathroom — I had to get a stool because he was taller — and I applied the details little by little, correcting them according to his instructions each time. We had to redo the whole thing at least thrice just to experiment, I got reminded how much more difficult this was than Yuna’s bangs; Kamui just couldn’t stay still and we would find ourselves laughing hysterically at how the paint had gotten in his orifices for the fifth time. The conclusive look was two dark blotches around his eyes that looked like they were melting off, the same blue on his lips, as well as a gigantic, orange eye on his forehead resembling a mystical symbol. I had drawn it whimsically, but he seemed to like it.

 

“I think I look cool” Kamui commented, looking at his reflection from every angle. “Like a dark clown or something.”

 

“Regulus will give you hell for this” I chuckled.

 

“Alright, you know what?” He shook up, apparently having come to a realization. “We should do something about the decrepit fuck. Make him pay a bit.”

 

Many unpleasant memories came to mind about the last time I’d talked to someone about taking a jab back at Regulus, and how it was an idea that definitely didn’t end well. I was certain Kamui would have withstood any punishment better than Minatsuki at eleven, but I also had to remind myself that giving a good impression was a matter of life and death for him — it was still his trial, after all, even if he didn’t want to think about it. 

 

“How do you even want to do that?” I looked him in his paint-cornered eyes, realizing how sad and hopeless I sounded only after speaking. Kamui smirked.

 

“Do a prank on him, a heavy one maybe ‘cause he deserves it. You gotta help me out though.”

 

I thought a lot before answering. As I weighed the pros and cons against each other, it was as if a door had just opened in my mind, showing me a perspective I hadn’t seen before. It dawned on me that there was  _ no reason _ we had to unquestioningly obey Regulus. Everyone around me was so blindly under his supervision that the idea just never occurred; even Minatsuki’s rebellious attitude had been tamed dramatically, and though he still bickered regarding orders, he mostly ended up executing them. Not to mention Yuna, who barely had an active conscience, and Laica, who followed the man like he was under a spell. Kamui made me long for revenge in that moment, reminding me of the benefits it could have brought to potentially get rid of Regulus. If there was any chance to leave — it meant a chance to be free and look for Koku. And so, I saw my mouth curl up in the mirror, moving the mark painted next to it slightly.

 

“I’m in.”


	9. 9.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was excessively busy but here! I finally wrote this chapter! This is gonna be the first time there's a continuous episode throughout *three* of them, because I really wanted to put something out so I left what I was gonna have at the end for the next chapter. I'll be (relatively) free soon, hopefully.
> 
> Gore and (I suppose) animal cruelty warning for this one. Should've seen something like this coming since Kamui is in it— well.

“See, we’ll get a lot of blood out of it if we skin them right. From the capillaries and all that.”

 

“Is it gonna be enough though?”

 

“It should be, we can cut n’ squeeze them a bit otherwise.”

 

I thought a little about how just months back I could have never imagined myself dissecting sewer rats in the back of an alleyway. With someone who knew more than he should have about how to pull the skin off of them right, nonetheless. I had my most disposable clothes on, the ones I usually did the ickier jobs in, along with a pair of plastic gloves I had snatched from a hotel storage room. As devoted as I was to what we were doing, it still irked me to deliberately come into contact with the gore bare-handed — ironic, yes, for a juvenile hitman, but this was somehow more unpleasant than shooting someone. Kamui wasn’t half as bothered as he knelt on the ground, watching the outer layer come away under his fingers as he collected the blood in the bucket between us.

 

“You’re not doing it right, Izanami. They’ll fall apart if you’re not careful” he reprimanded me upon seeing the sloppy results of my handiwork.

 

“Alright, jee. I don’t spend my time with this every day.” I pouted.

 

The dead bodies of rats piled up in a gory bunch as we proceeded; I saw one stranger passing by and looking in our direction briefly, some street delinquent, but he curled up his nose and walked away as quickly as he came. It was difficult and maybe morbidly entertaining to try and walk back carrying those  _ things _ on the street, but it was as if to Kamui slaughtered animals were like groceries and I had to hold back a giggle. Sometimes it concerned me that these things didn’t even affect me but I knew it was the environment I had been forced into.

 

“How much time do we have?” Kamui asked with a layer of anticipation in his tone. I looked at the watch on my wrist, included in our regular equipment. 

 

“He’ll leave in twenty minutes.”

 

“Spot-on then. I can’t wait for this” he grinned.

 

Piecing together Regulus’s schedule had been the more difficult part of the task. He did do everything at the same time, but he was also very vigilant about possibly being observed so the tactics to do so had to be well-engineered. We had figured the best way was feigning incompetence — the one thing the man couldn’t stop doing was looking down on us, after all — so I found myself knocking on his office door again and again, asking how to go about things regarding missions and such. I could see Regulus growing impatient after the fifth time of explaining how to efficiently take out a target, making an attempt at a bashful look as I sat on the chair by his stylish coffee table. 

 

“If you can,” he gesticulated, “you go for the carotid when you have a knife. But I already told you that.”

 

“I’m sorry…” I looked away quietly. 

 

“Izanami.” He sighed as he pulled out another report he had to fill in. “Go ask Minatsuki about these things next time. He’s more accustomed.”

 

I nodded; but by then, we knew there was a gap between five thirty and eight PM on Wednesdays and I could barely suppress the giddiness when I shut the door behind myself and immediately went off to find Kamui. A week passed and we were headed to the same office in those precisely calculated, lazy afternoon hours, a bucket half-filled with blood and another with skins. My eyes darted around suspiciously as my partner in crime picked the lock before, finally, the room opened. He relocked when we were in, out of caution, and proceeded to turn on the lights as I stood there, carrying our distasteful working material.

 

“Time to sniff around a bit!” Kamui stretched his arm muscles, satisfied with the state of things. He was already headed towards the expensive glass desk when I swallowed a lump of saliva in my throat and put down the buckets.

 

“Isn’t this dangerous?”

 

“Nah, it’s necessary;” he shrugged as he irreverently opened a drawer, “to really fuck with someone, you need to know what makes them tick. Besides the fact that I’m really curious about this guy.”

 

He was careless with flipping through documents, making an annoyed noise as he found nothing of interest — I gave in and started examining a cupboard with various books and objects behind opaque panels. I could work with locks too, so I eventually managed to take a look inside. It wasn’t unlike any other collection of knick-knacks Regulus kept around, books and bronze models; I kept asking myself why a doctor would have so much material on astronomy though. It was all so polite, innocuous and devoid of personal items that it almost made one suspicious and — as I would find out — with good reason. I somehow knew this had all been put together to avoid accusations, had someone broken into the office one day, and the chances of this hypothesis being correct and what it would have pointed to regarding Regulus sent shivers down my spine.

 

“God dammit…” I heard Kamui curse as he was finished with the desk. “It’s impossible he doesn’t have something weird in here.”

 

“Maybe he really isn’t hiding anything” I suggested as I got tired of my search bearing no results either.

 

“It’s impossible” he repeated, looking me in the eyes. “Kid, people aren’t this perfect. The ones who look like it are always messed-up. You know how saggy strippers around fifty do their makeup so well, right? You get good at masking flaws when they’re big.”

 

Although I didn’t visit strip clubs and was increasingly concerned about Kamui’s lifestyle, what he said made sense to me. It was, in fact, one of the best pieces of advice I had ever received, nevermind the fact that it came from a reggie who’d been half-demented since before he even got his symptoms. Our intrusion in the working space was turning into a detective game but I’d always had a hard time saying no to curiosity, so I abandoned my anxiety about our limited time frame and tried to put myself in Regulus’s shoes instead. It would be nearly impossible to do, right? I didn’t know what was going on in his head, or where he would have sealed away his belongings. My eyes were stuck on the floor before my feet in contemplation, so many possibilities running through my mind that even glimpsing away would have distracted me. It was then that I took notice.

 

“Kamui” I called, slightly spaced-out.

 

“Huh? Everything okay?”

 

“Look at this.”

 

I knelt down when he finally stood in front of me and stuck my long, filed nails in the crack between two wooden floorboards tentatively. Like magic, it lifted and came away easily, revealing a hollow space underneath half-immersed in darkness. Kamui looked charmed for a few seconds.

 

“Woah, you’re like a Sherlock Jones or something.”

 

It was nice enough of him for me not to have the heart to correct him. We reached in almost frantically, at the same time — it was shallow and I could palpate the contents, consisting in an array of papers of various sizes all gathered together. I let Kamui pull it out and stood up halfway to peek behind his shoulder, heartbeat picking up with excitement.

 

“Weird” he furrowed his brows. “Who are these people?”

 

On top of the pile was a photograph, the one he was currently holding; it was clearly taken after a university graduation and contained three students. Two young men, one with dark, scruffy hair covering his eyes and another blonde one, standing at the sides of a petite Asian girl with glasses. Though I had no way to interpret it, at least I could rest assured that we’d found what we were looking for, given that this surely wasn’t work-related.

 

“Oh, are you shitting me?” Kamui exclaimed, almost angry.

 

I stared at him in bewilderment.

 

“Look, it’s him.”

 

He was poking at the blonde man with his finger; it dawned on me too, then. Looking closer, I could make the connection between Regulus’s traits and those young, unabashedly handsome ones. I could instantly picture the sort of person he must have been in the past, the attractive boy everyone secretly fell for due to his aura of flawlessness, and it reminded me of what I’d been warned about earlier regarding perfection. It seemed he’d always had very light hair, but his face in the photo was smooth-looking except for the tiny dimples pulling at his cheeks as he smiled. 

 

Kamui, now sat on the floor, continued flipping through the papers. Next up was an ID card; I tensed up as soon as I read the name but decided not to mention it as it would have been too difficult to explain right now.  _ Erika Kazama Flick _ was, according to the document, attending the  _ Royal University of Cremona _ ’s biology faculty when it had been made, and turned thirty-four this year judging from her date of birth. The attached image made it easy to recognize her as the girl we had previously seen. Kamui seemed as confused as I was, but we were both lost in the story unfolding before us.

 

The few photos that followed were fairly mundane depictions of the same three people in various — sometimes humorous — life situations. A lot of them were portraits of the one apparently named Erika alone; she always smiled and seemed distracted, or at least concentrated on something other than the camera. And, right when I was getting absorbed into the nostalgic feel of the slideshow, the next thing I saw hit me in the gut so hard I stumbled back and saw blank for a few moments. I noticed that even Kamui had flinched away, holding the pieces of evidence away from himself like they were filthy — on the same day he’d skinned rats without a second thought.

 

“What the fuck…” His voice had a tremble in it that I could tell he was trying his best to conceal. 

 

As though we were in a scene from a detective series, five or so images with a grim, dark red colour scheme unfolded before us. It took one a while to put together what appeared on them but it was very, very clearly  _ blood _ and  _ cuts _ and a  _ naked female body _ . I could feel my brain desperately trying to interpret it as something other than the victim being cut to pieces and disfigured beyond recognition, but it was difficult. I felt dizzy when I noticed the colour and length of her hair, her body type judging from what remained, and I refused to make the connection, no matter how many factors were pointing at it. I would have forced myself to forget all of this — an ironic thought since I’d witnessed how memory manipulation worked — if it wasn’t for Kamui. No, he stated it, openly enough with his animalistic bluntness that it would consciously register.

 

“I’ve done messed-up things but even I wouldn’t—” he sucked on his teeth, looking at the photographs again, “I wouldn’t butcher someone I’m then gonna keep stalker shots of. Was he in love with this chick? What a son of a bitch.”

 

I stayed silent after that. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t be able to speak for a while. But Kamui got the message I was trying to convey by taking a few steps back; it would have been ‘ _ Hurry up, please, for god’s sake let’s get this over with _ ’ or something along those lines. Partly because I suddenly felt at a billion times more risk in that room, partly because I was dead set on Regulus deserving anything coming at him now and possibly worse. What we ended up doing felt too lighthearted and innocuous all of a sudden, but we stuck to the plan.

 

We left the office with light steps and bloodied hands. Inside was a gigantic message written in rat blood on the biggest available wall surface spelling ‘ERIKA’, with rat skins placed in a neat circle on the floor in front of it, as if they were praying to their cult god or mourning someone’s death. Kamui was the one who’d come up with most of this, he planned it out with dedication and even called it an ‘art project’, and because I was fourteen, it fascinated me. He’d also insisted that we watch the reaction that would follow, so we’d planned out our hiding spot; there was a small depository right across the corridor (the office had been set up inside our hotel, another thing that made me realize how influential its owner was), so we hypothesized Regulus wouldn’t lock the door after he’d entered and we would sneak back to open it ajar. 

 

It felt like puzzle pieces falling into place when he showed up and everything proceeded as planned. Just like we’d imagined, Kamui and I tiptoed back and made ourselves a minuscule crack to peer through when we estimated the target was far enough inside, and we did it swiftly enough not to be found — we’d done assassination jobs, after all. My breath hitched as I leaned in, the only thing I could hear was my own obnoxiously loud heartbeat. 

 

The scene didn’t start out sudden. At first, it was Regulus walking in with completely unsuspicious movements; I assumed he hadn’t seen the little creative display yet. The moment when he noticed was clear to delineate. He sort of froze for a few seconds, right after he calmly placed his files on the desk, so still he could have been made of marble. My fight-or-flight response was tensing up every muscle in my body, just waiting,  _ expecting _ the moment he would storm out in fury — but he didn’t. Regulus remained there in contemplation for an anxiety-inducing amount of time. And then, when I was convinced he would scream, his mouth opened but whatever came out was quiet, high-pitched and so, so unnaturally different from his usual tone; it almost didn’t sound like him first.

 

“You left me a message?”

 

I saw him stumble back like he was trying to get away from something. He bumped into the furniture, it was clumsy and full of trembles and rattles, and his hand was so shaky as he tried to support himself on the desk’s edge that it hit the surface in loud repetition like a Venus’s flytrap closing up. It was hard to discern his face, I would have rather not seen his expression in all honesty, but there was enough sweat covering it to make it glimmer.

 

“Erika—” came a choked-out sound from Regulus.

 

All I could do was give Kamui, slanting above me, a quick stare. This was already not what we had expected, and yet something was telling me we should have seen it coming. He was watching intently, less affected than me, even a bit excited — I figured he was proud of his artwork’s effects. Regulus moved to the side, limbs snappy and robotic, almost tripping in the coffee table. He was hyperventilating so hard I could hear it from where I was.

 

“I didn’t — It was not because of that, you know, right?” He was already blurting out incoherent phrases in a voice that sounded constantly on the verge of tears, but never actually crying.  “It’s… You knew I would… You shouldn’t have been that way…”

 

He took a few unsure steps towards the writing on the wall, reaching with one hand but struggling, like some unknown force was holding him back from touching it. There were a few seconds of relative silence with only his noisy exhales.

 

“No!”

 

The scream came too sudden. I contracted in a shock like a frightened animal for a moment. 

 

“You hurt me!” He continued yelling into the air, too far gone from the looks of it to care whether anyone heard him. “Both you and him! Fuck! Do you know how hard— It’s so hard! Fucking shit!”

 

As he crumbled on his knees in a pose oddly similar to the rat skins, I was getting the impression that whoever was before me wasn’t Regulus at all. And yet, at the same time, he had never felt more authentic, more true to himself than in those moments, which was on another scale of unsettling comparing to a lowlife criminal. His shoulders were shaking, but I don’t think he was crying. He was trying to, maybe.

 

“I truly cared” he said more quietly. “I cared so much. You were my life, but you did that... All the love I had… I feel so much love, you know, Erika, still.”

 

I wanted to make a simple summary and conclusion. I tried, again and again, to gather my thoughts. Even as we ran off and Kamui was talking to me, ‘ _ He’s nuts, Izanami, holy shit! He’s completely bonkers! _ ’, I was dissociating to the extent of my surroundings barely existing and the phrases directed towards me coming through like radio signals garbled by interference. The motion of my legs, the nodding, the re-settling of my heart rate happened almost on autopilot, though the fresh air of the balcony helped somewhat.

 

The first distinguishable message flashing before my eyes was the danger I found myself in. The sort of person who was currently in charge of my livelihood. How close I had been to true, complete insanity on the daily. It would have been the logical response to feel terrified and alert every day from then onwards, way more than I already was, but how  _ much _ wasn’t easy to even conceive. Strangely, seeing Regulus’s breakdown was as almost as traumatic as the Jaula Blanca attack, an effect that sounded odd and slightly unfair. It was about seeing an entity of almost absolute authority fall apart.

 

It started to dawn on Kamui that I wasn’t in the best state of mind, so he remained quiet after a point. We stared blankly at the sunset, air annoyingly still and hot around us, and I begged whatever god controlled the weather to give me just a tiny wave of wind. There was a lump in my throat that wouldn’t go away. Fourteen— even nineteen was  _ young _ , too young for certain things, I realized. Not for harsh trainings, theft, even for murders; but for seeing the worst, most world-shattering grime inside people and to understand, to  _ want to _ understand, to cry and plead and scream  _ because _ you understand. Was it better to be unaware? Or to be apathetic towards that awareness? I had never been in either position and I bitterly envied both. Perhaps I should have been thankful that those musings got cut short.

 

Kamui and I turned around as the balcony’s door opened behind us with a click.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hilarious Rat Prank GONE WRONG


End file.
